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THE 



LIFE OF JEHOSHUA, 



THE PROPHET OF NAZARETH. 



An Occult Study and a Key to the Bible, 



CONTAINING THE HISTORY OF AN INITIATE. 



BY 



FRANZ HARTMANN, M.D., 

Author of " Magic," " Paracelsus," " Secret Symbols of the 
Rosicrucians," Etc. 



Stoaftot ! 



BOSTON: 

OCCULT PUBLISHING COMPANY, 

120 Tremont Street. 

1888. 



/fos- 



Copyright, 1888, 
By FRANZ HARTMANN. 



Typography by J. S. Cushing & Co., Boston. 



PREFACE. 



The only object of the following pages is to aid in 
dispelling the mists which for many centuries have been 
gathering around the person of the supposed founder of 
Christianity, and which have prevented mankind from 
obtaining a clear view of the true Redeemer, who is not 
to be found in history nor in external forms, but who 
can only be found within the interior temple of the soul 
by him in whom his presence becomes manifest. 

It must be left to the intelligent reader to decide 
whether the accounts given in this book may be ac- 
cepted literally as historical facts, or whether they are 
intended to represent eternal and ever-occurring pro- 
cesses going on within the inner consciousness of man. 
The only key to the understanding of the truth is the 
power to perceive it ; for the truth teaches itself, — not 
by the light of argumentation, — but by its own light, 
and it teaches nothing else but itself. 

All that the reading of books can possibly accom- 
plish, is to aid us in bringing the truth which exists 
within ourselves to our own understanding, and to drive 
away the clouds of erroneous conceptions which may' 
keep us from knowing ourselves. 



4 PREFACE. 

There is nothing to prevent man from rising into 
the higher regions of thought where the light of the 
truth exists, except his clinging to erroneous opinions ; 
there is no way of driving away the darkness except by 
the diffusion of light. 

THE AUTHOR. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Dedication 7 

Introduction 9 

The True History of Christ (An Allegory) 25 

Jehovah 29 

Nazareth 38 

Egypt 48 

The Mysterious Brotherhood 59 

The Mysterious Brotherhood, continued 73 

The Higher Degrees 82 

The Wisdom-Religion 89 

The Temptation 94 

The Sermon upon the Mount 106 

The Doctrines of The Christ Spirit 118 

Herodias 125 

Jerusalem 135 

The Great Renunciation 145 

The Temple . 157 

The Hero 166 

The Final Initiation 180 

The Church 186 

Conclusion 197 



DEDICATION. 



Eternal One! Thou self-existent Cause 

Of all existence, source of love and light ; 

Thou universal uncreated God, 

In whom all things exist and have their being, 

Who lives in all things and all things in Him; 

Infinite art Thou, inconceivable 

Beyond the grasp of finite intellect; 

Unknowable to all except thyself. 

Nothing exists but Thou, and there is nothing 

In which no Good exists; Thou art, but we 

Appear to be ; for forms are empty nothings, 

If not inhabited by Thee ; they are 

Thyself made manifest. Addressing Thee 

We sin, because we separate ourselves 

In thought from Thee who art our very self; 

For we are nothing if we are not "Thou," 

And Thou art "we"; we have no life but Thine, 

No will or thought, no love or strength but Thine; 

Thou art our life, our will, our mind, our all; 

We are in Thee and Thou in us ; Thou art 

The "Father" and Thyself in us the "Son." 

Thy Spirit fills the universe with glory 

And impregnates all Nature with thy power, 

Enabling her to bring forth living forms 

Of plants and trees, of animals and men ; 

It fructifies the soul of man and gives 

Birth to the "Christ," the saviour of man, 



DEDICA TION. 

CalTd the divine Atma or the "Lord on high," 

The " Master, 1 ' He who makes immortal all 

In whom His presence is made manifest. 

If He awakens in the heart of man 

To the self-consciousness of His existence, 

Then will there be no further death, for He 

Is perfect and requires no further change. 

Thus " Christ " is God made manifest in Man 

As man, and no one can attain to God 

Except through Him ; for He Himself is God 

In Man, and He who strives to find His God 

Must seek for Him in His own holy temple 

Within himself in Spirit and in Truth. 

To Him, the Christ, the God in man we pray; 

To Him alone, not to external gods, 

Nor to the spirits in the Astral Light; 

And praying strongly we fulfil our prayers. 

For rising up to Him we are Himself, 

And grant that which we ask of Him ourselves. 

No man knows God ; it is the God in Man 

Who knows Himself in him and lifts man up 

To the conception of what is divine 

In his own nature. Rising up to Him 

We come to God through Christ, through God to Man, 

And to all nature in His Holy Spirit. 



INTRODUCTION. 



Ever since the beginning of the Christian era a storm 
of varied opinions in regard to the supposed founder 
of what is called " Christianity " has been raging in the 
world of mind, finding its expression on the external 
plane in deeds of violence, in innumerable cruelties, 
wars, atrocities, and crimes, such as are almost beyond 
the power of human imagination to conceive. From 
the time of the maniac-emperors, when the Roman 
arenas were reddened by the blood of the Nazarenes, 
down to the Middle Ages, when Christians had ceased 
to be persecuted and became persecutors in their turn ; 
when the scum of all Europe pillaged and plundered 
the inhabitants of the " Holy Land " in the assumed 
name of Christ ; — down to comparatively modern times, 
when the skies of all European countries were black- 
ened by the smoke ascending from burning fagots, upon 
which men, women, and children, suspected of heresy, 
were roasted to death by those who claimed to be the 
followers of Him who had taught the doctrine of uni- 
versal fraternal love ; — and still further down to our 
present time, in which the churches struggle to regain 
their waning powers and wealth, — the cause of all 



10 INTRODUCTION. 

religious warfare has always been a difference of opinion 
in regard to the nature of " Christ." 

While the most fanatical adherents of orthodox the- 
ology, entirely ignoring the religious histories of the 
world, with its Manus, Avatars, Buddhas, and Saviours 
of mankind, such as are said to have appeared upon 
this globe millions of years before the advent of modern 
" Christianity," regard the person of him who is called 
The Christ as being the " only begotten son " of an 
extracosmic creator of the world, conceived in some 
miraculous manner by a virgin of Palestine, and while 
they thus apply the most gross and sensual exoteric 
explanation to a beautiful ancient myth, which hides 
a sublime and eternal truth ; the modern critic either 
denies that such a person as the Jesus of Nazareth 
of the Gospels ever existed, or he sees in him merely 
a man of extraordinary talents, a hero who dared to 
proclaim what seemed to him to be the truth ; a reli- 
gious reformer, who died like many others for the 
promulgation of a grand but impracticable idea. 

Some of these critics are very profound thinkers ; 
but they have evidently not looked behind the veil 
that divides the eternal, ideal, but nevertheless real 
world from the sensual world of illusions, wherein we 
live. They were unacquainted with the constitution 
of the " spiritual " organism of Man, and they could 
only see the mortal part of Jehoshua; while their 
opinions in regard to his spiritual nature were based 
upon speculations which may have approached the 



INTR OD UCTION. 1 1 

truth in proportion as they followed their highest 
intuitions. 

Thus Kant regarded him as the ideal of human per- 
fection ; John Stuart Mill, as a very extraordinary man ; 
Lord Amberly, as an " iconoclastic idealist " ; Fichte, 
as the first teacher who revealed the unity of Man with 
the Supreme Spirit ; Hegel, as an incarnation of the 
Logos ; Schelling, as a kind of Avatar, i.e. one of the 
periodical descents of Divinity ; Dr. Keim, as a myste- 
rious man, whose glorified spirit inspired his disciples 
to attempt the reformation of the world ; Strauss looks 
upon him as a moral reformer, who occasionally stooped 
to imposture to secure the confidence of his adherents ; 
Renan, as an effeminate idealist, an impostor who per- 
formed " bogus phenomena " ; Schleiermacher, as a man 
in whom self-consciousness was so saturated with the 
Divine principle, that he really became a god incarnate ; 
Anatole Bembe, as a modern anarchist and socialist of 
the most fiery kind ; and Gerald Massey, who bases his 
opinions upon historical researches, finds that yehoshua 
Ben-Pandira was born some 120 years before the 
Christian era, and that the typical Christ of the gospels 
was made up from the features of various gods. 

It appears that those who have attempted to disprove 
the existence of an historical personal saviour of man- 
kind, have done no serious harm to the interest of 
religion ; because the pious mind intuitively feels that 
the gospel accounts, attributed to the four Evangelists, 
contain after all a great deal of truth, even if the events 



1 2 INTR OD UCTION. 

which are told therein have never occurred in history ; 
but those who attempt to base the whole foundation of 
their religious conviction upon the existence of an histor- 
ical Jesus and ask others to do likewise, may be doing 
serious harm ; for the belief in an historical Jesus can 
after all be merely a matter of opinion, and a faith based 
merely upon a possibly fallacious opinion, having no 
knowledge for its foundation, rests upon a very insecure 
basis indeed. There are very many well-meaning people 
upon this earth who imagine that it is indispensably 
necessary for one's salvation to believe that a man 
called Jesus of Nazareth once lived and died in Pales- 
tine ; but it would be difficult to give any intelligible 
reason why the belief in such an historical person 
should be necessary for that purpose, or in what way 
such a belief should differ in its results from a belief in 
Julius Caesar, Aristoteles, or any other person in history ; 
as all opinions in regard to things of which we have no 
personal experience are merely opinions and constitute 
no real knowledge. To believe in an event of which 
we know nothing is to cling to a superstition, even if 
the event is actually true. We can have no self-knowl- 
edge about persons that existed before we were born ; 
but we may at any time and at every place realize the 
presence of the true saviour, the eternal living Christ 
within ourselves. 

All attempts to explain intellectually the miracles and 
deeds attributed to the great Nazarene, for the purpose 
of making it more plausible, that they have actually 



INTR OD UC TION. 1 3 

occurred in a literal sense, are therefore degrading to 
religion, and may be looked upon as a sacrilege ; for 
they drag spiritual truths down to gross material life ; 
they force sublime ideas into narrow material forms, 
and destroy the beauty of the ideal by causing it to 
appear in a vulgar sensual shape. Even the most 
exalted virtues with which a poet may endow a per- 
sonal saviour will never give him that lustre which 
shines around the head of the eternal and impersonal 
Christ, and all attempts to make the beautiful allegories 
of the Bible agree with historical facts will be unsuc- 
cessful, and even appear ludicrous to the unprejudiced 
and clear-thinking observer. 1 

The question, whether or not the doctrines of the 
Bible are true, cannot be decided by answering the 
question, whether or not the events described therein 
have actually occurred in external life ; that proof must 
be sought in the internal evidence of those doctrines, 
and this evidence will appear plain enough as soon as 
they are understood. 

The vain attempts to prove rationally the possibility 
of the occurrence of miracles such as are described in 

. 1 Gerald Massey says : " The worst foes of the truth have ever been, 
and still are, the rationalizers of the myths, such as the Unitarians. They 
have assumed the human history [of Christ] as the starting-point and 
accepted the existence of a personal founder of Christianity as the one 
initial and fundamental fact. They have done their best to harmonize the 
divinity of the mythos by discharging the supernatural and miraculous 
element, in order that the narrative may be accepted as history. Thus 
they have lost the battle from the beginning by fighting it on the wrong 
ground." — Gerald Massey, The Historical Jesus and Mythical Christ. 



1 4 INTR OD UCTION. 

the Bible, are equally absurd ; for the indisputable proof 
that one single miracle had actually occurred, would 
immediately overthrow the foundation of all religions 
and destroy the belief in an eternal and unchanging 
God. God, being himself the Law, or the Cause of the 
Law, cannot act against himself without committing 
suicide, and those who are trying to uphold a belief in 
the possibility of anti-natural or absolutely supernatural 
occurrences, are denying that God is the ruler of Na- 
ture. They degrade him to a fallible being who changes 
his mind, and is subject to whims, such as are produced 
by external influences ; but what external influences 
could possibly act upon God, who is self-existent and 
omnipresent and who includes the All ? The fact that 
no miracle has ever occurred is the most formidable 
argument for the existence of a universal God ; for it 
proves the existence of universal and unchangeable 
Law, whose Law-giver must be equally universal and 
not subject to change. Those, however, who attempt to 
reconcile the miracles of the Bible with material reason, 
by seeking to explain them by theories of sleight of 
hand, or by the spiritistic theory, are to be pitied most ; 
for they prove that they have neither the faith which 
characterizes the Christian, nor sufficient intellect to 
see where the so-called " realities" end, and where the 
realm of the fable representing the true Ideal begins. 

From " profane history" we can gather very little in- 
formation in regard to the person of the great reformer. 
All that we can learn from a few short remarks in Tact- 



INTRODUCTION. 



15 



tus and Josephus (believed by some to be interpolations) 
is, that some such person actually existed, and we are 
led to infer, that he was regarded by some as a sorcerer, 
by others as one of the would-be reformers and religious 
fanatics of those times, that he was opposed to the pre- 
vailing religious views, and that on account of the at- 
tacks he made upon time-honored institutions, upon 
which the security of the church and the authority of 
the clergy rested, he was finally put to death. 

So-called " sacred history," as contained in the "four 
gospels," is believed to give a detailed account of his 
life and his doctrines; but while there seems to be a 
vein of truth in regard to actual historical occurrences 
underlying the gospel accounts, the great bulk of the 
latter is in contradiction to Common Sense, and merely 
a repetition of different allegories, such as we may find in 
the ancient books of the Egyptians, Persians, and Brah- 
mins. These ancient myths have been most curiously 
mixed up with the biography of Jesus of Nazareth and rep- 
resented as having actually taken place during his life. 
In fact, the few probable details in regard to the life of 
Jesus are so much loaded with fables and misinterpreted 
allegories, that the "New Testament" deserves to be 
regarded rather as a poem, describing psychological pro- 
cesses, than as a book of history, describing external 
occurrences. 

If we examine that book without any prejudice and 
without any sectarian bias, we find therein two currents 
of thought. The first applies to the life of a man, who 



1 6 INTR OD UCTION. 

— if he has not been entirely misrepresented — must 
have been a great genius, a hero, and a reformer. The 
second current refers to sacred truths, such as were 
taught in the secret doctrines of the Arians and Egyp- 
tians ; truths which we find stated in the books of Hermes 
TrismegistuSy in the Bhagavad Gita, and others. In 
these ancient books we find reference made to the Christ 
principle long before the name of " Christianity " was 
known, and the myths of the "Immaculate Conception," 
the "Son of God," etc., may be clearly traced to this 
ancient origin. This discovery, far from throwing 
discredit upon the veracity of the principles upon 
which primitive Christianity was based, serves rather to 
strengthen the foundation upon which the original doc- 
trines rest ; it does not overthrow the truths stated in 
the Bible, but goes to confirm them, by showing that 
the processes thus allegorically described, are not merely 
events of the past, but that they are continually occur- 
ring, and will in all probability continue to occur in the 
future. 

It is usually claimed by those who adhere to a belief 
in a merely personal and historical Christ, that the gos- 
pels were written by the apostles, who having been 
disciples of Jesus and eye-witnesses of the miracles he 
performed, knew what they were talking about. Granting 
— for argument's sake — that these men had left some 
written accounts; they cannot be held responsible for 
all the additions and interpolations which were after- 
wards made by their followers and which cannot stand 



INTRODUCTION, 1 7 

the test of sound reason and logic. It has however been 
proved by recent researches, that neither of the four 
gospels in their present shape was written by the apos- 
tles ; but that they were probably collected long after- 
wards by some unknown members of the church, who 
labelled them with the names of the apostles, so as to 
impress upon them the stamp of unquestioned authority ; 
while they undoubtedly eliminated from the existing 
traditions a great deal that may have appeared preju- 
dicial to the interests of the church, or contrary to their 
own views and opinions. 

It is not our intention to enter into a discussion in re- 
gard to the origin of the gospels, nor would we expect 
any great benefit to arise from a controversy in regard 
to such matters; because in matters of religion and 
where no knowledge exists, sentiment forms a stronger 
attraction than reason. /No argument is strong enough 
to force a person to lose his hold of a favorite opinion 
to which he has resolved to cling; while those whose 
knowledge is the result of mere argumentation, have 
usually very little power of spiritually perceiving the 
truth. Those who cling to time-honored superstitions 
as well as those who love scepticism and sophistry, will 
live on the food they have chosen, until they are satiated 
with it. / 

What does it matter to us, after all, to know whether 
or not pur ideal Christ has ever existed in history ? If 
we were in a position, or if it were necessary for us to 
imitate the daily deeds of the man Jesus of Nazareth in 



1 8 INTRODUCTION. 

all their details, then would it perhaps be important to 
know whether or not the accounts told of these deeds 
are literally true ; but as we are living in a different age 
and under different circumstances, we cannot imitate his 
external life in all its details ; but we can look up to him 
as a high ideal and imitate his inner life, and we may- 
live up to such an ideal without knowing whether or 
not it has ever been embodied upon this earth. To imi- 
tate his thoughts is far more important than imitating 
his personal acts. 

If we look at the image of Jehoshua, seen through the 
trembling mists of incense, mixed with the vapors of 
human blood and the smoke of burning heretics, we see 
merely an unnatural and distorted image of the Jewish 
Jehovah, a ghastly-looking shadow that seems to be 
neither a god nor a man. If we look at him from a 
rational standpoint, and apply to him the rule by which 
mortals are usually measured, we find that our measure 
is somewhat too short, for we discover in him a sublim- 
ity of character, an unlimited love, a transcendental 
intelligence, such as is not found combined in one per- 
son in the modern history of the world ; but if we look 
at him as being one of the full-grown flowers of human- 
ity, a person whose mind was illuminated by Divine 
Wisdom, — an Adept, — who possessed the knowledge 
of his own Higher Self, all that appears strange and 
impossible in his. character becomes at once clear and 
comprehensible ; but we cannot conceive of him in that 
light, without entering to a certain extent within the 



IN TR OD UC TION. 1 9 

mystic realm of occult science, whose key is the power 
of spiritual perception, called Intuition. Looked at in 
that light, he stands before us as an ideal Man and as a 
personification of Divine Wisdom. 

The standard of morality and spirituality of a people 
will always depend on the quality and attitude of the 
ideals they follow. If their ideals are monstrous and 
unnatural, they will be vicious and lead unnatural lives ; 
if their ideals are true, they will be guided by considera- 
tions of truth. The ideal created by the Spanish monks 
and which they called their " Christ " was a devil, and 
their deeds were the actions of devils. The standard of 
morality and spirituality existing among the various 
Christian churches of the world, including more than 
two hundred Christian sects, may be correctly estimated, 
according to their higher or lower conception of the 
term " Christ." In many cases we find that conception 
very narrow, and therefore the doctrines of these sects 
differ in such cases widely from the doctrines of Christ. 

"The Christ" or "Messiah" means the redeeming 
power of Universal spiritual consciousness, love, and 
intelligence, while the limited " Christ " of the churches 
is merely a person, whose love manifests itself at best 
only inside the church. The real Christ means Univer- j 
sal Life, while the " Christ " of the sects means sepa- 
rateness and favoritism. True Christianity means 
spiritual enlightenment, universal benevolence, charity 
and tolerance ; Churchianism means mental darkness, 
stubborn ignorance, selfishness, intolerance, self-conceit, 



20 INTRODUCTION. 

and hate for all who will not submit to clerical rule. 
True religion, such as may perhaps be found in the far- 
distant golden age, means that entire renunciation and 
self-sacrifice, such as we find it described in the Bhaga- 
vad Gita and in other sacred books of the East, and 
which is also represented by the ill-understood symbol 
of the Christian Cross ; but modern sectarianism, the 
offspring of the worship of the bloodthirsty Jehovah, is 
based upon a concentration of all our hopes and aspi- 
rations upon the attainment of some selfish personal 
benefit here or in the hereafter ; upon a craving to save 
that worthless self, even if its salvation were to involve 
the ruin of the rest of the world. 

True religion — the power to know and realize spirit- 
ual truths — is attained by those who can rise above the 
sphere of their illusive self ; sectarianism is kept alive 
and nourished by the love of men for their own animal 
self and by the fear to lose that beloved thing. As long 
as this love of self — based upon an entire misconcep- 
tion of the true nature of Man — is not eradicated from 
the heart of mankind and replaced by knowledge, the 
Upas-tree of dogmatism will find therein a soil in which 
to spread its roots and to reap temporal benefits for the 
church at the expense of the eternal welfare of its de- 
luded adherents. 

In Jehoshua Ben-Pandira we behold a divinely in- 
spired man. Inspired, — not by any external personal 
deity, — but by the eternal light of Divine Wisdom, that 
illumined his mind. We behold in him first a Rabbi, 



INTR OD UC TION. 2 1 

a man of great talents, who sought earnestly after the 
truth, and who, after having been initiated into the 
ancient Egyptian mysteries, became a prophet and a 
seer. Having arrived at a knowledge of the truth, he 
heroically defended it against the priests of the temple 
and sacrificed his life in the attempt to bring the life of 
the true Christ, that existed within himself, to the under- 
standing of the masses. He attempted to dispel the 
clouds of darkness, created by superstition and fear, so 
that the light of spiritual knowledge might enter the 
hearts of mankind. He taught the principle of univer- 
sal fraternal love, of a love for the sake of love, — not a 
love on account of expected rewards ; but his ideas were 
too grand, too sublime, to be comprehended by the nar- 
row-minded bigots of his age. He was murdered by 
those whom he attempted to save, and He — whose 
whole life-effort was directed to overthrow the supersti- 
tious belief in a limited God, separated from humanity 
and subject to whims and caprices, — was so little under- 
stood by his followers, that, after his death, those who 
claimed to believe in his teachings, made of himself such 
a limited god, separated him from humanity, and selected 
him for an object of their external worship. 

In u Jesus of Nazareth" we behold a beautiful allegory, 
representing the spiritual germ of divine Intelligence in 
the soul of Man, conceived in the heart by the power of 
the spirit of Divine Wisdom, continually born in the 
mystic Bethlehem situated in the purest region of the 
human soul. To speak of Him as an "historical per- 



22 INTRODUCTION. 

son " is a blasphemy and an absurdity. He never was 
killed by the Jews, although he is continually crucified 
by professed Christians. He is alive to-day and will live 
forever, and resides in the hearts of those who adore him 
and obey his commands. 

Is mankind nowadays better prepared to receive the 
gospel of the universal saving power of Knowledge and 
Love than when Jehoshua lived ? Are men ready now to 
do away with the religion of fear and selfishness and 
substitute for it the gospel of Freedom ? Will it now be 
possible for them to comprehend that their beloved self, 
to which they cling with the grip of despair, as a drown- 
ing man clings to a straw, has no permanent existence at 
all — but is merely an illusion, a product of a continually 
changing interaction of correlating forces ; which, acting 
within the physical plane, produce that sensation which 
causes the illusion of isolated existence ? Will the pious 
be ready to believe, that before they can hope for any 
immortality of their individual self, they will first have to 
begin to live by finding that individual Higher Self, their 
Saviour, who exists in a life beyond the separation of 
form ? Will they be ready to receive the gospel of eter- 
nal and universal life in the spirit, or will they regard a 
doctrine which denies the immortality of the lower self 
as being identical with denying the immortality of the 
soul? Have men become intelligent and heroic enough 
to be free, or must they still be furnished with the 
crutches of hope and fear to enable them to stand up- 
right ? Are men now their own Masters, or are priest- 



INTRODUCTION. 23 

craft and superstition still necessary evils, to keep the 
ignorant in subjection and terror and to make them obey 
the law ? Is a religion which is based upon the love of 
men for their animal selves, and whose only excuse for 
existence is its expediency and usefulness for political 
and social purposes, really useful in the end ? Is such a 
religion calculated to ennoble mankind, or may perhaps 
the cause for the growth of selfishness and its resulting 
evils be found in that spirit of egotism upon which that 
religion rests? Will it be practicable now to proclaim 
truths, which have at all times been carefully hidden 
from the eyes of the ignorant, and if not, should not 
the truth be told for its own sake and irrespective of 
any consequences that may result therefrom ? Can the 
knowledge of the truth have any other effect in the end 
but that of ennobling those who open their eyes to its 
light, even if the dawn of to-day will cause a temporary 
disturbance among the dark mists of ignorance which 
cover the face of the earth ? 

These important questions seem to be well worthy of 
our consideration, especially at the present day, when 
the Christian temples all over the world are seen to 
totter and shake, because they are built upon sand; 
when the monsters of anarchism, socialism, nihilism, 
etc., born of ignorance, rear their heads, and tyranny 
and monopoly, the offspring of selfishness, are vampiriz- 
ing humanity ; when the whole of Europe appears to be 
threatened by a devastating war, and America is begin- 
ning to suffer the ills produced by causes transplanted 
from the old world to the new. 



24 INTRODUCTION. 

In regard to so-called science, the age which seems 
now to be nearing its end has been one of blind materi- 
alism ; in regard to so-called religion, it has been one of 
formalism and credulity in supposed historical facts ; but 
it is said that now has the time arrived when one of the 
seals of the " closed book" spoken of in the Bible is to 
be opened; that is to say, that the understanding of 
mankind as a whole will be opened to a comprehension 
of eternal truths, which for ages past have been mis- 
understood. 

The following allegories describe the processes which 
are taking place within the inner or thought-life of all 
who strive for initiation, and which must have therefore 
also taken place within the inner life of Jehoshua, if 
that person was what we may well suppose him to 
have been, — a man illumined by the spirit of Divine 
Wisdom. 



THE TRUE HISTORY OF CHRIST. 

{AN ALLEGORY.) 

Forever the Light shine th into darkness, but the darkness com- 
prehendeth it not. 

Long, long ago in the past, perhaps millions of ages 
ago, at a time beyond human calculation, there was a 
realm of Light, wherein resided the Spirit of Wisdom. 
His body was like a Sun, and the living rays emanating 
from him filled the universe with glory. Matter of a 
fiery and ethereal kind, such as is unknown to man, 
filled all space, and the light coming from that Spirit 
penetrated the realm of Matter and endowed it with 
life and sensation. Gradually this matter began to cool, 
centres of attractions were formed, and around these 
centres still more matter condensed, and they grew 
into revolving globes travelling with lightning velocity 
through space, being guided by the Spirit of Wisdom. 
Upon these globes stones, vegetables, animals, and 
human beings grew. 

But in proportion as this matter became dense and 
solid, it became impenetrable to the light coming from 
the Spirit of Wisdom, and the men born therein groped 
in darkness, until they discovered a phosphorescent 
substance in the caves of the earth which gave forth a 



26 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

light like a diamond after having been exposed to the 
sun, and they called it "Ratio." By the light of this 
stone they were able to see their surroundings. Men 
and animals used this stone, but in the hands of men it 
shone brighter than when the animals used it. 

But the light which they now possessed threw a false 
glitter upon the objects which it illuminated and caused 
them to appear distorted and not as they actually were. 
The Spirit of Wisdom, pitying mankind on account of 
their ignorance and darkness wherein they lived, re- 
solved to descend to them ; but being unable to make 
himself visible to men, because their eyes had become 
petrified and blind, he attempted to manifest himself by 
assuming a more solid shape in their souls. 

He entered the Heart of Man and found it to be a 
stable, filled with animals of all kinds. There was an 
ox called the Will, tied to the yoke of passion, and an 
ass called Reason, led about by erroneous speculations. 
There was a hog called Intemperance, and a goat called 
Lechery, and around the door prowled the tiger, the 
wolf, and the hyena, seeking to gain admittance, while 
snakes and poisonous reptiles were wriggling and crawl- 
ing through the cracks of the roof. The stable was full 
of impurities, the windows were covered with cobwebs, 
that prevented the light from entering ; but in spite of 
these disgusting surroundings the Spirit of Wisdom 
remained there and attempted to clean it and transform 
it into a temple, fit for him to reside therein. 

He attempted to make his presence known to the 



THE TRUE HISTORY OF CHRIST. 2*J 

proprietor of the stable, but for a long time his calls 
were not listened to ; for besides the noise made by the 
animals in the lower part of the building, there was a 
great noise made in the upper story, which was occu- 
pied by traders of all kinds, by lecturers and preachers, 
scientists, theologians and moralizers, of whom each 
one tried to make himself heard above the rest. 

By some accident the voice of Wisdom attracted at 
last the attention of the proprietor, but he could not 
understand what it said, for the language seemed for- 
eign to him. He therefore sent a commission to exam- 
ine the claims of that Spirit. Sophistry and Supersti- 
tion, the daughters of Ignorance, and a fellow named 
Logic, an illegitimate son of a woman called Experience, 
arrived, accompanied by a dog called Selfishness. They 
listened to the Spirit and wrote down what he said. 
They then asked him for his certificates, to prove who 
he was, and wanted to dispute with him ; and as he did 
not answer their arguments in a manner comprehensible 
to them, they shook their heads and did not believe 
what he said. The animals clamored. that the strange 
visitor should be ejected, for his presence disturbed 
them in their comfort and ease. Moreover, the angel 
having begun to assume a material form, needed some 
nourishment to acquire substance and strength, and he 
abstracted blood from the animals in the stable and 
nourished himself with it. 

Such a state of affairs appeared intolerable to the 
proprietor of the house, and he resolved to kill the 



28 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

intruder. He was, however, afraid to attack him openly, 
because he feared the light that shone from his body. 
He had in his employ two servants in whom he trusted, 
although they were two thieves, who continually robbed 
their master of his most valuable treasures whenever 
any opportunity offered itself ; but he knew it not, and 
believed them to be his faithful assistants. The name 
of one of these thieves was Credulity, and the name of 
the other was Scepticism, and both were the greatest 
enemies of the Truth. 

One evening the Spirit went into the garden that 
surrounded the house. He had succeeded in transform- 
ing, by his magic power, some of the animals into men, 
and they followed him ; but the proprietor hearing of 
his whereabouts, sent his servants to have him arrested. 
But Credulity and Scepticism had never seen the Spirit 
of Wisdom and did not know him ; they therefore ap- 
plied to Logic, who by a certain trick of argumentation, 
which he had learned from a sorceress in the West, 
whose name was Curiosity, managed to come very near 
to the Truth, and kissed him, and (they) then treach- 
erously overpowered the Spirit^, of Wisdom and caused 
him to be crucified. But th^ Spirit, being immortal, 
could not die ; the men who attempted to kill him 
merely destroyed his form, and thereby rendered them- 
selves incapable of seeing his outward expression, and 
the Spirit of Wisdom returned to his eternal home, to 
descend again and again into the hearts of men and to 
repeat the same process forever and ever, by being born, 
crucified, and resurrected every day. 






"JEHOVAH." 

A beautiful god is the most noble product of Man. < 

Man-created gods are most wonderful beings. They 
possess all the virtues and vices of those who made 
i them, and they in return cause their creators to be 
; vicious or virtuous, foolish or wise. It is known to 
1 the student of occult science, that if a man consciously 
and wilfully performs an act, whether it be good or 
evil, he calls a living power into existence, which reacts 
upon him, until the strength with which it has been 
endowed by him who conjured it up, is exhausted, and 
while it lives, it may be either a curse or a blessing to 
its creator. Thus it is even with the creating of gods, 
and the law that applies to an individual man also ap- 
plies to a people. 

From the time of the Babylonian captivity up to the 
present day a curse seems to have been attached to the 
Jewish nation. They have been persecuted in almost 
every country; they have been hated wherever they 
went. Justly or unjustly, their cowardice, selfishness, 
and greed have almost become proverbial ; as a nation 
they have surpassed all others in grasping and hoarding 
wealth ; they are as a whole believed to be tyrannical, 
unrelenting, and obstinate, while on the other hand they 



30 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

excel other nations in such virtues as grow from a state 
of separateness and isolation ; they closely cling to each 
other, they assist each other in need; they love their 
families, and become even heroes in the defence of what 
they may legally claim as their own. 

If we attempt to trace the curse which seems to rest 
upon them to its origin, we may find it in the fact that 
they have created that cruel, bloodthirsty, and selfish 
god, whom they called "Jehovah," and the god whom 
they had created, reflected upon them his own attributes 
and became the instrument of their punishment. They 
materialized a grand idea, forced it into a limited form 
and endowed it with life, and they thereby chained them- 
selves to that form and became its slaves. In creating 
a separate god of their own, isolated from the universal 
God of humanity, they became themselves separated 
and isolated from the rest of mankind ; their god, whose 
favorites they imagined themselves to be, was the out- 
come of their own selfishness, and he became the instru- 
ment of their torture : the birth of Jehovah became the 
curse which clung to their heels wherever they went. 

For millions of years the eternal Brahm, the great 
and universal Spiritual Sun of Wisdom, had sent his 
beneficent rays into the world of mind. He knew no 
distinction of person, but gave the light of wisdom to 
all who opened their hearts to receive it ; the water of 
Truth descended like rain upon all, and refreshed those 
who opened their souls to drink it in. Life, Light, and 
Happiness were accessible to all mankind, without the 



JEHO VAH. 3 1 

interference of man-ordained priests ; the Universal God 
asked for no other sacrifice but that which rises up 
spontaneously from a pure heart, the adoration of abso- 
lute Good, — a sacrifice which, kindled by the fire of un- 
selfish Love, rises up like a cloud to the throne of the 
Eternal and returns again like heavenly dew, showering 
upon him who offers the sacrifice seven times more of 
that which he gives. 

Thus in ancient times the heaven-ordained priests — 
that is to say, all human beings who were conscious of 
the existence of a universal divine ideal — fed the gods 
with sacrifices of pure and exalted thoughts, and were 
fed in return by the gods ; 1 they sent their spiritual 
aspirations from the altar of a pure heart into the 
highest regions of thought and called spiritual forces 
into action, which reacted upon them, endowing them 
with knowledge and ennobling their characters. Their 
"prayers" served to thin the veil of matter by which 
they were surrounded and to enable them to look 
beyond the "gates " of their prisons. The higher state 
of consciousness to which they arose created a new 
"Jerusalem" in their souls and caused them to realize 
their own true manhood and their true condition as 
living, embodied, spiritual powers, kings and lords of 
creation. They needed no help from external, personal 
gods ; because they were aware of the living presence 
of the universal Spirit of Wisdom acting within them- 
selves. 

1 Bhagavad Gita, III. 12. 



32 THE LIFE OF J EH O SHU A. 

But as with the increase of the population the battle 
for terrestrial existence became stronger, and men, forced 
by external circumstances, began to give more attention 
to their animal necessities than to the requirements of a 
life in the Eternal, as they became strongly attracted to 
sensual things, and lost proportionately the power to 
conceive of that which transcends sensual perception ; 
they became unconscious of their own divine nature, 
they lost confidence in the divine power within them- 
selves, and clamored for help from external sources. 
They forgot how to pray, and learned how to beg ; and 
as no god appeared to give them the things which they 
desired, they invented gods of their own. They needed 
gods who promised to save them from slavery, because 
having become slaves to Self, they were now too busy to 
execute the commands of their master, and to attend to 
his affairs, to give much attention to their salvation, and 
to work themselves effectively to recover their freedom. 
Thus the Unlimited, Eternal, and Infinite disappeared 
from their view, and in its place they created limited, 
personal, and changeable gods. The god which the Jews 
created was called "Jehovah," — a name whose real 
meaning was known only to few, — and they endowed 
him with all the good and evil qualities which character- 
ized their own selves. 

Natural and heaven-ordained priests, such as were con- 
scious of the divinity existing in man, and who refused 
to render homage to man-made gods, were persecuted 
and slain ; divine worship became a matter of trade and 



JEHOVAH. 33 

was intrusted to man-ordained clergymen, who had no 
higher ideal than their own semi-animal selves, repre- 
sented by the gods who were the offspring of their own 
imagination. The interest of the church became par- 
amount to the acquisition of Wisdom, external cere- 
monies and material sacrifices took the place of spiritual 
aspirations and heart-offerings, hopes of future rewards 
and fears of punishment in the dread hereafter took the 
place of that nobility of character which seeks to do 
good for the love of Good, irrespective of any conse- 
quences that may accrue to one's self therefrom. Exter- 
nal heavens and hells were invented, and the priests truly 
possessed the keys to them ; for by acting upon the 
imagination of the believers, they could cause them to 
believe to be either in heaven or in hell. Thus the 
eternal Reality, the Truth, was deposed from its throne 
in the hearts of men, and priest-craft, with its illusions, 
assumed the sceptre. 

When the Jews created their god they lost their own 
manhood ; they lost all confidence in their own power. 
Thenceforth they trusted in their creature, and the god 
whose fathers they were, fed them with promises and 
prophecies, which were never kept nor fulfilled. While 
the gods of the Romans inspired the latter to perform 
deeds of valor, this Jewish god promised to accomplish 
their duties for them. Instead of helping themselves, 
they now waited for help from their god, and remained 
slaves, bound by chains of their own construction. But 
in vain arose to the clouds the odor of burning bullocks 



34 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

and sheep from the altars of the temples ; Jehovah 
had no power to help his worshippers. He was a 
monster, created by selfishness and needed all he had 
for himself ; he could not give life to the Jews, because 
his own life depended on the life-energy he received from 
them ; he could not fulfil their expectations, for he had 
no power but that which was lent to him by his wor- 
shippers. Only when men create gods from whom they 
expect nothing, will their expectations be fulfilled. 
When they realize this truth, then will the creating of 
gods become useless, and men will again become able to 
find the one true and universal God, who fulfils all his 
promises by acting in and through the organism of 
Nature and Man. 

As long as men have different desires, they will have 
different gods ; as long as they wander at the base of the 
mountain with many peaks, each man will believe the 
peak which is most prominently before him to be 
the highest of all. Only when they have all arrived 
at the summit, will they know the highest point ; only 
when they have arrived at the highest conception of the 
truth, will they begin to know the universal God. They 
will then see that the gods whom they worshipped before, 
and who seemed so grand, were only the products of 
illusions, and that standing on the summit, they — on 
account of the altitude they occupy — are, as it were, 
the summit themselves. 

By worshipping the gods whom they create, men 
worship nothing else but themselves. They are creat- 



JEHOVAH. 35 

ing a mental image, which they endow with their own 
character ; they concentrate upon it their thoughts, 
their hopes and fears, and as they themselves become 
old and toothless and wrinkled, they are horrified to see 
the image in the mirror before them change its features. 
They discover imperfections about their god, where 
they had imagined everything to be perfect. They then 
attempt to " doctor " their god ; they apply plasters and 
salves, they paint him and dress him up, they seek to 
prolong his life ; but the new generations, having a 
younger ideal, see him putrefy below the varnish and 
mask : they want a young god, a god that resembles 
themselves, and they create a new one for themselves. 

Thus gods are continually subject to change. As 
the character of a nation changes, so changes its god. 
To reform the gods of humanity, humanity must be 
reformed. Only when all men are of one mind, will 
they all have the same God. 

•But that universal ideal which causes all men to be 
of one mind cannot be found in external creeds, cere- 
monies, and forms, nor in adjustable opinions and doc- 
trines ; for external appearances, opinions, and theories 
are continually subject to change. Each human being 
differs from every other in his external appearance and 
in the way he thinks. There is only one thing which 
all men share and which constitutes their humanity : 
it is the consciousness of being human ; the knowledge 
that they are superior to stones, vegetables, and animals, 
and that they belong to the great family of mankind. 



36 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

This consciousness does not change as long as men 
remain human. If they become brutalized they also 
become unconscious of their dignity as human beings ; 
they then cease to be men and remain human merely in 
external shape. Likewise, in proportion as men rise 
up to a realization of what is divine and eternal in man, 
they become conscious of a higher state of existence ; 
they expand into gods, while they still have the stamp 
of humanity impressed upon their forms. When all 
men will have become conscious of this Divine state of 
existence, then will they all have one common God. 

There can be only one Supreme Cause of life, con- 
sciousness, and wisdom, and its dominion must extend 
wherever these three factors exist. Men cannot know 
God as long as they are not divine themselves ; but 
when in the course of evolution mankind will have 
thrown off the chains which bind them to the attrac- 
tions of matter, they will again become able to know 
within themselves the character of the true and universal 
God, whose wisdom is manifest everywhere in Nature, 
whose external aspect is visible in all places, but whose 
power can be realized only by him in whom God has 
awakened to self-consciousness. Then will men know 
that God is One and All in All, and that Humanity is 
spiritually one without separation and division. 

Then will a wail arise from the gods that have been 
created by man, for their end has come. Then will a 
wail arise from the Pharisees and the scribes who claim 
to be the keepers of wisdom and messengers of the gods 



JEHOVAH. 37 

which men have invented ; for the gods, the servants 
of the church, will be useless, and with them their own 
authority will be at an end. Then will the people cease 
to sacrifice to the golden calf, and the kingdom of the 
true yehovah, who rejoices within the hearts of men 
when they kill their animal passions and sacrifice to 
him their erroneous opinions, will be restored ; but 
those who refuse to open their eyes to the sunlight of 
truth will remain in darkness and suffer the tortures 
which they themselves have created by their own mor- 
bid imagination. 



NAZARETH. 

From the conjunction of the Intellect and the Intuition, the Son, 
whose name is Wisdom, is born. 

One of the most beautiful countries in Palestine is 
Galilee. It appears like an oasis in the midst of the 
desolate sunburnt wastes, so frequently seen in the 
Holy Land, and in one of its most charming spots is 
situated the village of Nazareth. Green are the fields 
and abundant the forests, and in the orchards around 
the huts composing the village the fig and the lemon 
grow. To the east is the River Jordan, flowing tran- 
quilly between the gardens and villas situated upon its 
borders and sparkling in the light of the sun, from the 
time when that fiery orb rises above towering Mount 
Tabor until he sinks again below the horizon, behind 
the cliffs of the Carmel mountains, that loom up in the 
distant west ; while towards the north may be seen a 
small white strip, the Mediterranean Sea, throwing its 
foam upon the sandy beach of Phoenicia. 

Thus in the mind of man, and in the midst of the 
wilderness of opinions, a place may be found, deserving 
the title of " Holy Land," where the river of thought 
tranquilly flows, illuminated by the Sun of Divine Wis- 
dom, that, ever since the beginning of the world, arose 



NAZARETH. 



39 



from the East ; while in the distant West loom the dark 
mountains of Scepticism. In that sacred place will the 
Truth, the true Saviour, be known. 

At the beginning of the Christian era the village of 
Nazareth was a collection of huts, built like all small 
oriental houses of sun-dried clay, put up apparently 
without any pretension to design. There were none of 
those broad avenues and streets, comfortable for walk- 
ing and driving, which we are accustomed to see where 
European civilization exists ; but there was that charm- 
ing disorder and variety which gives to ancient towns 
their peculiar character and endows each spot with a 
certain amount of individuality of its own. The houses 
were without windows towards the sides of the street, 
to keep out intruders, and they received their light 
from interior courts, which in this mild climate served 
as places for sitting or working during the day and for 
sleeping apartments at night. 

The population of Nazareth, amounting to some four 
thousand individuals, were for the most part a modest 
and unassuming people, differing in that respect from 
the inhabitants of Judea. They were of a mixed kind, 
consisting of Hebrews, Phoenicians, Arabs, and Greeks, 
to which were added a number of Roman officers and 
guards, stationed there for the protection of the inter- 
ests of the Romans. 

As it is usually the case in places where types of 
various kinds intermingle, the women of Nazareth were 
very beautiful. They were celebrated on account of 



40 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

their charms all over Palestine; nor could it fail that 
their beauty attracted the attention of the stately Roman 
soldiers, and that the latter won the love of the former. 
Human nature was at those times not fundamentally 
different from what it is now, and we need therefore not 
be surprised to hear, that one of the stalwart Roman 
warriors, whose name was Pandira, fell in love with one 
of the dark-eyed daughters of Nazareth, and that the 
fruit of their "illegitimate" union was a son, whom they 
called Jekoskua, and who, having inherited from his father 
the manly pride of the Roman, and from his Jewish mother 
his almost feminine beauty and modesty, became an 
appropriate vehicle for the unfolding of that great and 
powerful spirit of wisdom that inspired him to over- 
throw the altars of the cruel Jehovah and to teach man- 
kind the gospel of fraternal love. 

Let not the pious ear be shocked at the statement 
that Jehoshua was of illegitimate birth; nor need the 
"historical" fact that he was born out of wedlock les- 
sen our respect for the great reformer; for it is not 
often that the truth comes in a manner which is con- 
sidered legitimate among men. They consider only 
that knowledge legitimate which has for its parents ex- 
ternal observation and logic ; but the greatest spiritual 
truths come by intuition, without external signs. They 
are the products of interior perception and understand- 
ing, and they are rejected as being illegitimate by those 
who reason from the plane of external effects. They 
descend silently from heaven, they enter the soul during 



NAZARETH. 41 

our dreams ; they may be communicated to us in visions 
and are seen by the spirit, but they are not accepted by 
the sceptical intellect, which is spiritually blind. The 
way in which such a knowledge arrives is authorized 
neither by science nor by the church, for sciences and 
churches belong to external things, and such truths are 
therefore rejected by the world. 

Only those whose souls are pure and immaculate, 
whose minds have formed no legalized adulterous alli- 
ances with pseudo-scientific and erroneous theological 
dogmas, only those whose hearts cling to no foreign 
opinions, but possess within themselves the spirit of 
knowledge, will be able to receive such illegitimate 
truths by the power of inspiration. Their souls may 
become " Mothers of Christ," their minds illuminated 
by the Holy Spirit of Sanctity, their hearts become 
living temples of God. 

Of Jehoshua's mother little is to be said. Women in 
oriental countries — then as now — had but little oppor- 
tunity for receiving an education or for displaying any 
other accomplishments than their natural talents and 
physical charms. Ignorant, innocent, and of modest 
manners, uneducated but kind, sympathetic and beauti- 
ful, Stada, like many others of her sex, was guided more 
by the decisions of her heart than by the calculations 
of her intellect. Her heart yearned for love, and she 
hoped to find in Pandira the realization of her ideal. 
Her story is a mere repetition of millions of others of 
the same kind. As in the case of her prototype PsycJie, 



42 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

her lover departed as soon as she began to find out 
who he was, and after a period of grief she married a 
poor citizen, a carpenter, who, on account of her beauty 
and sweetness of temper, consented to become her hus- 
band and a father to her child. 

In the family of this carpenter and builder of houses, 
Jehoshua passed the days of his childhood, learning to 
construct toy-houses and cages for animals. He evidently 
was a very talented child ; for the toy-houses which he 
constructed were as well adapted for their purposes as 
the physical form of man is adapted for his soul. While 
the gospel accounts, whose allegorical language evidently 
refers to the growth and awakening of the intelligent 
principle in man, represent Jesus as a supernaturally 
wise, and therefore unnatural child, the so-called apocry- 
phal gospels speak of him as a wild and mischievous 
boy, who naturally possessed some powers of black 
magic, by which he injured his playmates whenever 
they dared to contradict him or refused to submit to 
his whims. Considering the latter accounts as having 
been greatly exaggerated, we may well suppose that, 
having inherited from his father the temperament of a 
soldier, he found but little taste in following the pro- 
fession of his foster-father, and preferred roaming about 
the neighborhood of the village and a stroll to the 
mountains, to handling the saw at the carpenter's bench. 
The illegitimate and therefore unwelcome son of the 
carpenter's wife was not overestimated or unduly fon- 
dled at home, and many a little storm arose in that 



NAZARETH. 43 

peaceful house in the village of Nazareth on account of 
the roaming habits of that boy who loved to stroll away 
from the village at night, to climb among the rocky 
recesses of the Carmel mountains, or to sit on moon- 
light nights upon a cliff, looking out upon the wide ex- 
panse of the Mediterranean Sea, dreaming of countries 
which he had never seen, and wondering what shores 
were upon the other side of the water. 

A schoolhouse may be a good place to educate the 
Intellect and to bring it to an understanding of exter- 
nal phenomena; but for the expansion of the spiritual 
Intelligence and the ennobling of character, Nature her- 
self is the best teacher. Great is the superiority of the 
educated and learned mind over the uneducated; but 
still greater is the light of those who have been taught 
by Nature herself, and acquired wisdom independently 
of the instruction of mortals. Those who spend their 
lives in schools often acquire a great deal of informa- 
tion in regard to external things, which may be very 
useful as far as it goes, while at the same time they 
may lose the capacity to perceive internal and funda- 
mental truths, which are far more important than all 
they may possibly learn in regard to phenomenal exist- 
ence. 1 Why is it that often shepherds, hunters, and 
fishermen, and those who spend their lives in the soli- 
tudes of the mountains, the forest, or the ocean are 
capable of conceiving of very exalted ideas, far beyond 
the intellectual grasp of the dogmatist? Is it perhaps 
that the spirit of man, beholding by means of the senses 



44 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

the wide expanse of Nature, is attracted towards the In- 
finite and Eternal, his legitimate home, and thus loosens 
the chains that bind him to his terrestrial prison, and 
thins the veil which prevents men from looking into the 
realm of the Unknown ? Little does our modern civil- 
ization know about that grand school in which the 
universal spirit of Divine Wisdom is teacher, where 
the heart expands and the mind conceives ideas too 
grand to be expressed in the language of mortals ; but 
often, when the physical body is resting in sleep and 
the intellectual powers of man cease to watch, the 
spirit, loving his freedom, may steal away from his 
labor of building his toy-prison house, and roam about 
in the regions of his eternal home, until he is called 
back by the awakening senses, to attend to his terres- 
trial labors. 

While rambling through the fields and forests of Gali- 
lee the mind of Jehoshua expanded and began to stretch 
its feelers towards the realm of the Eternal. Often 
while entering into meditation, half-forgotten memories 
of previous lives passed upon this planet, flitted before 
his soul, and indistinct images of the future presented 
themselves to his spiritual vision. What is "memory" 
but a power to recollect and spiritually perceive the 
images of the past impressed upon the Astral Light? 
and may not our spirit as it expands and increases in 
power, not only remember its own previous existences 
upon this globe, but read in the memory of Nature the 
whole history of the world? A yearning to know the 



NAZARETH. 45 

Unknown filled his soul, and his mind, not being 
crammed with adopted opinions, drank wisdom from 
the universal fountain of truth. 

As he grew up, the political and religious questions of 
those times began to attract his attention. Being a 
Hebrew with Roman blood in his veins, he shared 
neither the intolerance and hate of the Jews against 
their oppressors, nor the contempt with which the lat- 
ter regarded the former, and this fortunate circum- 
stance helped to a great extent to develop in his soul 
the germs of religious and political toleration, and to 
cause them to grow and expand into that love for all 
humanity without distinction of race and religious opin- 
ion, whose representative he became later on. 

Why do men quarrel about their opinions in regard to 
religion ? Has not every one a right to believe what he 
pleases, as long as he has no knowledge? When real 
knowledge, such as results from a direct perception 
and understanding, arrives, then there can be no more 
quarrelling about theories. If a blind man were to 
deny to one who sees that the latter is able to see, the 
seer would hardly care to argue with the blind, nor 
would he be likely to convince him ; for real knowl- 
edge cannot be taught, it must be gained by experi- 
ence. ! What we learn without experiencing it, is 
merely a matter of opinion. He who quarrels with 
another in regard to opinions is after all merely quar- 
relling with his own doubts. 

Quietly and monotonously passed the days at Nazareth ; 



46 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

there was but little trade carried on in that place. Agri- 
cultural occupations and the vintage were the things 
that took up the attention of the inhabitants ; but the 
great event of the year was, when at the time of the 
festival of the "Tabernacles" and " Passover" the coun- 
try population went to Jerusalem, to enjoy the sights of 
the capital and to attend to the customary religious 
observances. On such an occasion the streets of the 
capital resembled a fair; the houses were filled with 
strangers, and on the outside of the city walls camps 
were put up, where, sheltered by tents and straw-cov- 
ered huts, the pilgrims cooked their meals and discussed 
the events of the day. 

On such occasions the great temple was crowded from 
morning till night. Traders of all kinds filled the courts, 
and even into the sanctuary penetrated the noise of the 
merchant praising his goods and disputing about the 
price with the buyer; while in the interior of the tem- 
ple equally greedy Pharisees sold theological creeds and 
promises of heavenly rewards to the believers. Some of 
the halls were devoted to the distribution of justice, and 
in other halls learned discussions were held. There the 
letter of the Law was explained with lengthy arguments 
and elaborate sophistry, while the spirit of the ancient 
doctrines was denied and driven away. The secret 
meaning of these doctrines was known to few, and 
those who knew it were looked upon as being heretics 
and persecuted by the orthodox adherents of the church. 

Thus the temple at Jerusalem resembled the mind of 



NAZARETH. 47 

man, where a continual warfare is going on between the 
interests of the lower animal and reasoning self, and the 
dictates of divine wisdom are not listened to. In 
the mind of man, as in the temple of Jerusalem, there 
exists a continual struggle between conflicting opinions, 
between selfish desires of different kinds, between doubt 
and superstition, hope and fear, and the Scribes and 
Pharisees appealing to the selfish propensities in the 
constitution of man, often assert their borrowed authority 
and overpower the truth by means of sophistry and an 
erroneous application of logic. 

Jehoshua was frequently present during those learned 
disputations. His natural common sense revolted at the 
sophistry of the Pharisees, by which they perverted the 
truth, and taking part in the discussions he disconcerted 
them by his questions and confounded their logic. The 
intrepidity and intelligence he manifested on such occa- 
sions attracted the attention of Rabbi Perachia, a former 
president of the Sanhedrin, who was more intelligent 
and liberal than his colleagues. He invited Jehoshua to 
his house and became his instructor. A strong friend- 
ship grew up between the old man and the boy, and as 
the former was about to visit Egypt for the purpose of 
prosecuting certain researches in the sciences called 
occult, he invited Jehoshua to accompany him on that 
voyage, and the latter gladly accepted the offer. 



EGYPT. 

Man, after having vainly sought for the light of the Truth in 
externals, and found nothing but darkness, at last discovers that the 
land of the sunrise exists within his own soul. 

Hail thee, O Egypt, thou sanctuary of ancient mys- 
teries, thou land of magic and wonders ! When the 
truth was driven away from its birthplace in the East by 
the king of all evils, the love of Self, it found a refuge 
with thee. Thy indestructible books hold the records 
of ancient wisdom, and sectarian bigotry has in vain 
sought to destroy them. With thee they will rest safely, 
until selfishness dies and men wake up to a conscious- 
ness of their freedom. Then will the truth return to 
them, and they may re-enter the Holy Land of Knowl- 
edge. 

In vain the powers of darkness have attempted to 
silence the voice of the truth that speaks through thy 
stony lips. Sectarian Vandals have broken thy tablets 
and plastered up thy hieroglyphics ; but thy stones cry 
out and proclaim the gospel of wisdom. Men have car- 
ried away thy monuments, and they have become mes- 
sengers of light from the East to the West. No more 
is thy ancient wisdom taught in subterranean caves to 
the initiated ; thy secrets have been profaned by the 



EGYPT. 49 

profane ; thy sacred pearls have been thrown before the 
swine of superstition and to the dogs of blind scepti- 
cism ; but the swine and the dogs turned away from the 
pearls and devoured only the dirt with which the treas- 
ures were covered. Men have robbed thy temples of 
precious gold, but the gold which they found turned to 
ashes in the hands of the selfish, because they did not 
know its true value. They went to the fountain of 
truth, to drink of its waters ; but their cups were not 
purified. They communicated to the water their own 
impurities, and it became a poison to them, causing vil- 
lanous leprosy, which they communicated to others. 
They penetrated to the ark that contained the mystery, 
but they had no key to unlock it ; so they carried away 
the ark and exhibited it in the West, but the mystery 
remained in Egypt. 

To thee, O Egypt, the true Redeemer was known ; 
not as a man made deity, or as a figure in history ; but 
as the Spirit of Truth, constituting all that is immortal 
in man. Thy Knowledge was too grand to be grasped 
by the pigmies that invaded thy soil, desecrated thy 
temples, profaned thy sanctuaries, travestied the truths 
which were taught and made of a sacred myth, that 
teaches an eternal truth an historical falsehood. 

Who can enter an Egyptian temple or even look at 
one of these ancient monuments, without feeling a sen- 
sation of awe and solemnity, which few Christian cathe- 
drals, with their puppets, manikins, and tinsel, will ever 
produce ? How far more grand and sublime than our 



50 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

modern misconceptions must have been a religion that 
expressed itself in such gigantic forms ! Who but an 
animal can behold these pyramids, the symbols of im- 
mensity, whose bases rest upon the earth, and whose 
points reach up to heaven, without feeling the oppres- 
sion of Matter and the desire of the Spirit for freedom ? 
Who can behold these monuments of a forgotten past, 
without sensing the presence of that consciousness 
which fills all space, the Spirit of God still floating over 
the waters, without limits, indivisible, all in all, present 
everywhere and pervading every atom ? 

Is there any soul in so-called inanimate things, and if 
not, what causes these stones to speak to our inner con- 
sciousness with a voice much louder than that of the 
occupant of a pulpit ? Is it perhaps that the Truth itself 
is speaking to us through these stones, while the pul- 
pit orator merely repeats what he has learned, and is 
therefore merely an echo of the opinions of fallible men ? 

Have stars souls, or are they merely dead aggrega- 
tions of matter ? and if they are without souls, what is 
the force that keeps their atoms together and guides 
their revolutions in space ? / Why is Supreme Wisdom 
— a wisdom beyond the conception of Man — every- 
where manifest in Nature, if in Nature no consciousness 
exists ? If Nature is an unconscious thing, how can 
Wisdom exist without Consciousness and Intelligence ? 
Is Nature a product of Life, or Life a product of 
Nature ? and must there not be a Consciousness of some 
kind, wherever is Life ? Is it not reasonable to sup- 



EGYPT. 



51 



pose that what we call " Motion " is a manifestation of 
Life, and that what we call " Matter" is endowed by the 
universal Spirit with a certain amount of Life, and that 
the life of different forms differs in its manifestation 
merely according to the organization of the Matter com- 
posing the forms ? ) If this is true, then there is no inor- 
ganic matter of any kind to be found in the forms of 
nature, but stones and rocks must have organizations of 
their own, and each planet its own peculiar life, differing 
from the life of other stars in the treasury vault of 
heaven. 

If this view is seen to be correct, then will the appar- 
ently dead universe, with its unconscious motion and its 
causeless mechanical laws, be transformed into a thing 
of life, pervaded with invisible but living and conscious 
powers, guided by one eternal unchangeable Law origi- 
nating in divine Wisdom. Then will those dead globes 
of matter, floating in space and obeying mechanical laws 
for some unexplainable reason, be changed into a living 
family of children of the universal God, who are all 
doing the will of their Father, because it is their Father's 
will that endows them with life. 

But if the suns and stars and all the so-called inani- 
mate things have life, then they must have some kind 
of consciousness and sensation, even if they are not 
self-conscious and have no knowledge of individual sep- 
arate life. They may be subject to loves and hates, to 
desires and passions, to attractions and repulsions. 
Then it would seem that the ancient Astrologers were 



52 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

right after all in attributing certain virtues and vices to 
the different planets and stars and in believing in a 
certain kind of interchange between their radiations. 
There is no reason why stars should not be in posses- 
sion of Intelligence, even if they are not conscious that 
they are existing as separate beings. Is it not possible 
that even a high degree of Consciousness and Intelli- 
gence may exist in an organism that is not aware of the 
fact of being an entity different from other entities in 
the Universe ? 

Let us here ask the question, whether a high state of 
consciousness and intelligence is not possible even in 
Man without any consciousness of Self. Are not men 
most happy when they forget their own selves ? Do 
they not, when they become interested in reading a 
book or in witnessing a theatrical performance, listening 
to music, etc., forget for the time being that they are 
entities existing separately from others ? Do men not 
even drink the intoxicating cup for the purpose of for-, 
getting Self, and are they not miserable in proportion 
as they think of themselves ?y Men do not cease to live 
or to think, to be intelligent, to know, to love, and to 
will, when they forget their own Self; but they then 
cease to have selfish thoughts, a self-will, and a selfish 
imagination. If we could be free forever from that 
sensation of Self, we would not cease to be conscious 
and intelligent and happy ; but we would cease to be 
limited by that self, and we would all do the will of the 
universal God and partake of his thoughts. 



EGYPT. 53 

Perhaps a glance at the ancient books of Wisdom may 
throw some light upon this matter. 

If we open the Bible, the first verse of the first chap- 
ter of Genesis teaches us a great truth, taught by the 
Egyptian Hierophants : " Bereschit bara Elohim, ath 
ashamain on ath aoris." This is to say: "The First 
Cause produced the powers which constitute heaven and 
earth." 1 If the First Cause produced all beings, even 
those that have life, it must be itself the source of all 
Life. If it produced the powers which constitute Wis- 
dom, it must be Wisdom itself. If the Great First 
Cause is Spirit, — and what else can we call it ? — then 
by producing all things it endowed them with its own 
spirit, and all things must have a spiritual basis, which 
enables them to exist. All things must have "souls," 
and it is their souls which cause their material constitu- 
ents to act upon each other, and produce the divine har- 
mony which we observe throughout Nature. 

Where do the material constituents of a being end ? 
Are they all enclosed within the shell of its visible form, 
or may there not be invisible radiations of sensitive 
"matter," not having entered the solid form, but never- 
theless belonging to its organization ? Does not the 
Corona of the sun belong to its substance as much as 
the fiery globe constituting his inner body ? Does not 
the power which a magnet exercises at a distance belong 
to the magnet ? May we not look upon a star as being 

1 The term "heaven" refers to all states of consciousness; "earth," to 
all forms of matter. 



54 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

an organized body, whose periphery extends as far as its 
influence reaches, while its visible globe is merely the 
visible kernel of the great invisible mass, and may not 
the same reasoning be applied to all living beings, even 
to Man ? If this is true, then we are all — like the stars 
— living within the spheres of each other, and all beings 
are substantially one, separated from each other merely 
by the illusion of form. 

It is very difficult for man, whose perceptions are sub- 
ject to the limitation imposed by form, to conceive of the 
invisible and formless ; but he will never be able to 
obtain the key to the understanding of the divine mys- 
teries of nature, until he realizes the Unity of the All, 
and knows that the so-called invisible and unknowable 
realm is the real and substantial world, while the great 
phantasmagoria of corporeal forms is merely an illusion, 
produced by aggregations of matter and constructed by 
the souls of things, the carpenters in the workshop of 
Nature ; the step-fathers of the newly-begotten son of 
Divine Wisdom. 

It is known that the ancient Egyptians were well 
versed in Astronomy, and recent discoveries made in 
regard to the construction of the Great Pyramid go to 
show that they knew in many respects more about this 
science than the moderns suspect ; but to them the 
suns and planets were representing invisible realities. 
To them the visible corporeal stars were merely external 
manifestations of invisible internal powers. Where the 
present civilization beholds nothing else but dead mate- 



EGYPT. 55 

rial bodies, obeying the mechanical law of gravitation^ 
whose cause it cannot explain, the ancient Egyp- 
tians beheld a universe filled with life, following the 
universal law of order and harmony, whose cause is the 
Will of the eternal Creator, who produced these forms 
within the substance of his own Mind. 

The visible terrestrial sun was to them a representa- 
tion of the invisible spiritual Central Sun of Divine 
Wisdom, named the Sun-God Osiris (Christ), unknowa- 
ble to external sensation, but manifesting itself as Horus 
(Jesus) in the hearts of mankind; becoming "regener- 
ated " within the souls of the pure by the power of our 
eternal Mother, Isis, the ever immaculate virgin, the 
goddess of Nature. " God " to them was not a limited 
being, but the Eternal Cause of all manifestations of 
power within the realm of Matter and in the kingdom 
of Spirit, containing within himself everything that 
exists, and yet in consciousness being superior to all be- 
ings. While all things are living and changing in him, 
he remains always the same; tranquil in his eternal 
glory and undisturbed by any external influence. He 
does not descend to us, but the gifts which we receive 
from Him differ according to the positions we occupy 
in regard to Him. 

Let those who desire to know whether these doctrines 
are true look within their own minds, for Man is an 
image of his creator. There they will find a continually 
changing region of thoughts. Subjective forms of all 
kinds throng that interior realm, ever changing, and 



56 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

without rest. But if they penetrate deeper, even within 
the realm of the spirit within, they will find a tranquil 
place and a principle whose state of consciousness is 
not affected by the changes going on in the mind, and 
yet these changes are produced by that principle, send- 
ing its rays into the world of ideas existing within the 
mind. ( The divine spirit in Man does not descend to the 
sphere of man's intellectual understanding; but Man 
may rise up to it in his thoughts^ There are periodical 
changes taking place in the mind of man, similar to the 
astronomical changes in the universe. There are ebbs 
and tides of thought, as there are ebbs and tides of the 
ocean. There are times when Man involuntarily ap- 
proaches nearer to God, and times when he recedes. 
The Egyptians knew that all the mental processes going 
on in the mind of Man are images on a small scale of 
the processes taking place on a grand scale in the Uni- 
versal Mind, and that external phenomena are the shad- 
ows of internal realities. Being aware of the unity of 
the All and knowing the nature of the spiritual forces 
in the Macrocosm of Nature and their correspondences 
in the Microcosm of Man, they studied the position of 
the stars, to know the time when Humanity would again 
approach nearer to the divine Sun of Wisdom. They 
were able to tell the changes occurring in the spiritual 
condition of mankind by studying the position of the 
visible sun to the Zodiac. 

But we are entering here upon forbidden ground. 
Even if we were able to expose the sacred mysteries 



EGYPT. 57 

of the ancient Egyptians to the scoffer and sceptic, it 
would be a sacrilege to attempt it. Moreover, these 
mysteries cannot be explained ; they are beyond the in- 
tellectual conception of mortals. They can only be per- 
ceived intuitively by the spiritual intelligence of Man 
after he has become self-conscious of the divinity of 
his God. 

These sacred mysteries were in the possession of the 
Holy Brotherhood, and they were taught only to those 
select few who were fit to be instructed in them; or, 
to express it more correctly, they were not taught at 
all, but the candidate was instructed how to act, so that 
his own spiritual powers of perception might be devel- 
oped within him, and he become able to see and know 
such things himself. To be admitted within the sacred 
precincts of the Crata Repoa, it was necessary, not only 
to lead a blameless life, but to be in possession of ex- 
traordinary talents and strength of character, and to 
devote one's life entirely to the practical application of 
the truths that were taught in this order. 

There were several degrees in that fraternity, and no 
one was admitted as a member of a higher degree until 
he had completely mastered all that was to be acquired 
in the lower degrees, and which sometimes required 
many years to accomplish. An initiation in that order 
or a passing to a higher degree, was a terribly serious 
matter, having nothing whatever in common with the 
sham-initiations, mummeries, idle ceremonies, and ill- 
understood mysteries of modern secret societies. It was 



58 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

exceedingly difficult to be admitted as a candidate, and 
still more difficult to pass through the prescribed trials, 
which were rather of an internal than of an external 
character. Many of those who did not succeed in stand- 
ing the tests imposed upon them became insane ; others 
paid with their life the penalty for their daring, or had 
to remain prisoners in subterranean caves until death 
came to release them. 

Jehoshua applied for admission to one of the mem- 
bers, but was refused ; he applied a second time to 
another member, but was refused again ; but after he 
had applied for the third time, to his great joy he was 
admitted as a candidate for probation, and he entered 
the temple at the day appointed for his preliminary 
instruction. 






THE 

MYSTERIOUS BROTHERHOOD. 

There is nothing more difficult to find than one's own self. 

After Jehoshua had entered the Egyptian temple, 
he was led into the presence of the assembled priests. 
They questioned him in regard to his object in desiring 
to enter their order, and admonished him to desist ; 
warning him of the dangers that he was to incur, if he 
insisted in pursuing this way to obtain knowledge of 
the secret sciences and to come in possession of the 
powers which such a knowledge conveyed. They told 
him that if he were once admitted, there would be no 
possibility to retreat, as he would have to succeed or 
to lose his freedom and perhaps even his life ; for 
powers of evil which would be aroused would conquer 
him, unless he were strong enough to conquer them. 

Jehoshua Ben-Pandira was not to be intimidated ; he 
desired to obtain knowledge and considered wisdom 
to be more valuable than life. He insisted upon being 
admitted. He received the blessings of the Brothers, 
and as each of these venerable men laid his hands upon 
his head, he felt an electric thrill pass through his 
frame, that seemed to invigorate him and to give him 
a power sufficient to overcome all dangers. After this 



60 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

he was given over to a guide called Thesmophores, who 
blindfolded him and led him away. 

He went with his guide through several long cor- 
ridors, from whose walls the echoes of their steps 
resounded, and they descended a flight of stairs until 
at last they arrived at the place of their destination. 
When the hood was removed, Jehoshua found himself 
in a cave hewn in the solid rock. It was a high arched 
vault with massive pillars, cut in a manner to represent 
figures of men and fabulous animals. The only light 
which entered into the vault came through a round 
opening far up in the roof, where a small part of the 
clear blue sky could be seen. Upon the walls of that 
prison were written proverbs and mottoes, consisting 
of extracts from the books of the Egyptian and Indian 
sages who may have lived in the far-distant past, per- 
haps even in prehistoric times, when that which we now 
call Europe formed the bottom of the sea, and another 
continent was at the height of its civilization at a place 
where now the ocean rolls its waves. 

The room was furnished in the most primitive fashion, 
containing merely the most necessary requisites. The 
Thesmophores told the candidate — for such he had now 
become — that he would have to remain here in soli- 
tude for an indefinite period of time. He advised him 
to occupy himself with thinking of the nature of man 
and his destiny and to meditate about his own self. 
He gave him some writing materials and requested him 
to write down the thoughts that would enter his mind 






THE MYSTERIOUS BROTHERHOOD. 6 1 

and seem important to him, and after taking leave of 
the prisoner and wishing him good success, the guide 
went away. 

Thus when the free spirit seeking for knowledge 
sends its feelers into the tomb of living clay, blindly 
following the law of reincarnation, he finds himself 
alone without a guide, left to his own thoughts, and 
with only a faint light above coming from his former 
home, while on the walls of the prison house called the 
Mind, he may find dim recollections of the teachings of 
wisdom acquired in previous lives. 

Jehoshua was now alone. There is nothing more 
terrible than isolation and solitude to those who know 
of no other life but that of external sensation and who 
cannot create their own thoughts ; especially if there 
is no change in their surroundings, to attract their 
attention and to stimulate them to think. Thinking is 
an art, and few can think what they wish or hold on to 
a thought. Men only think what they must ; they feed 
on the ideas that enter their minds without asking. 
Welcome and unwelcome thoughts enter ; they neither 
come at our bidding nor go away when they are not 
wanted : they are like disorderly guests that do not obey 
the rules which the landlord prescribes. 

The monotony in which Jehoshua lived remained 
unchanged. There was no sound of any kind to be 
heard ; he was surrounded by silence ; and if it had not 
been for the small opening in the vault far above his 
head, he would not have known the changes of day 



62 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

and night. He studied the writings upon the walls, 
and impressed them upon his memory, analyzing their 
meaning ; and the more he thought about them, the 
more his mind seemed to expand and new ideas enter. 
He could not tell from whence they came, but he wrote 
them down upon the tablets with which he had been 
provided ; and often when in the morning he awoke 
from his slumber, these tablets had disappeared from 
his prison, and he knew not what had become of them. 
He saw no one enter the room, and yet somebody must 
have taken them away. Likewise the food with which 
he was provided was supplied by invisible means. It 
was of the most simple kind, consisting of bread, milk, 
fruit, and water. It was daily brought to him in some 
inexplicable manner ; how or by what means he could 
not tell, for it was put into his prison during his sleep. 
However, he soon ceased to be astonished at such 
strange occurrences and he began seriou^Ty the study 
of self. As he became accustomed to look within his 
own soul, a new world seemed to open before him ; 
his imagination grew stronger, and the pictures pre- 
sented before his inner eye became as objective and 
real to him as the objects of the external world, only 
more beautiful, more ethereal, and yet far more substan- 
tial than the latter. Visions of things which he had 
formerly seen, but which had apparently been lost to 
his memory, appeared again, vivid and real with all 
their living details ; desires entering his heart immedi- 
ately took objective forms in his mind, representing in 



THE MYSTERIOUS BROTHERHOOD. 63 

seemingly living forms the objects of which he thought, 
and thus he saw many beautiful things in his visions, 
but also many horrible sights, for no man is without 
evil, and evil thoughts that came to him were likewise 
represented in seemingly real but horrible forms. 

What is this plastic power of the imagination, and 
what do men mean by calling subjective images "merely 
works of imagination" ? Can we imagine anything that 
does not exist ? Are the creations of our thoughts less 
real to us than the things which the imagination of 
others created for us ? Is not the universe a product of 
the imagination of God, and are we not gods in our own 
inner world, able to create forms from the substance 
called the Astral Light f 

Gradually Jehoshua began to love this inner life, where 
he found a world as large as the outer world, with a 
space as infinite as that of the latter, with mountains 
and plains, with oceans and rivers, and peopled with 
beings of various kinds that looked up to him as their 
god, their creator, drawing life from his Will, and nour- 
ishment from his Thought, in the same sense as Man 
receives his will-power and ideas from the God in the 
universe, appearing to him in his dreams while asleep, 
and in visions while awake. Thus Jehoshua lived in the 
world of the Elemental Powers of Nature, and began to 
know the constituent parts of that organism called the 
human soul. 

Weeks, perhaps months, thus passed away. Who 
knows how long he remained in that tomb? He 



64 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

kept no record of the days and nights since he had 
entered there, and what is time and space, after all, but 
merely mental conceptions by which we attempt to 
measure the Infinite ? But one day steps were heard 
to approach ; the door which had been closed so long 
opened, and the Thesmophores entered, congratulating 
him on his success and inviting him to come to the Portal 
of Man, to enter as a Neophyte into the first degree of 
the holy Brotherhood. 

They entered a large park, through which they passed, 
until they arrived at an entrance called the Door of the 
Profane. There they found a great many people assem- 
bled who had been attracted by curiosity to see the new 
candidate for initiation, for such a rare event was not 
kept secret, as it was desired that the people should 
know that there were still men to be found ready to dare 
all dangers in search of the truth. They thronged the 
place in front of the door through which Jehoshua passed 
with his guide, on his way to the Temple of Wisdom ; 
they shouted and made much noise, obstructing the way ; 
but the Thesmophores drove them back, and they passed 
safely through the crowd. 

Having entered the vestibule of the temple, the can- 
didate was taken to a Crypt, where he took a bath, and 
received new garments, and underwent the prescribed 
preparation to be introduced to the assembly of the 
Brothers. 

The Portal of Man was guarded by the Pastophores, 
who, as they arrived, inquired about their purpose 



THE MYSTERIOUS BROTHERHOOD. 65 

and asked Jehoshua various questions. Having received 
satisfactory replies, the door opened, and he entered 
a large hall, wherein in a semicircle were seated the 
Brothers, and in their midst the Hierophant. Before 
this assembly Jehoshua again passed an examination, 
answering numerous questions in regard to his subjective 
experiences during his isolation. 1 

He was then led around the Bisantha, and there the 
strength of his nerves and his physical courage, by cer- 
tain methods which cannot be made intelligible to the 
modern reader, because they involved an employment 
of certain forces of nature, the secret of which was in 
the possession of the Atlanteans and Egyptians, but 
whose very existence is as yet unknown to western 
civilization. It may be sufficient to say, that if claps 
of thunder resounded and bolts of lightning seemed to 
strike the candidate, 2 they were not produced in the 
manner employed in theatrical performances upon the 
stage, but they were the effects of natural forces, set 
into action by the occult powers possessed by the Egyp- 
tian Adepts. The most horrible spectres appeared, but 
Jehoshua was not afraid. 

Having successfully passed through this trial, he was 
again taken before the assembly, and the Menies read to 
him the laws of the Crata Repoa, which, after due ex- 
amination, he solemnly promised to obey. 3 By a certain 

1 Plutarch in Lseon. " Apoph. verb. Lysand." 

2 Eusebius 1 Caesar, Preparat. Evangel. 

3 Alexander ab Alexandre), Lib. V. Cap. 10. 



66 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

process known to the Hierophant, his spiritual vision 
was then opened ; that is to say, he was endowed for a 
short time with the powers to see certain spiritual veri- 
ties represented in allegorical forms. He found him- 
self standing between two square columns, called Be- 
tiles, and there was a ladder with seven steps 1 and 
eight closed doors? As he beheld that vision, its mean- 
ing was at once clear to him, for spiritual visions differ 
from mere dreams especially in so far that he who be- 
holds a symbolical vision becomes at the same time 
aware of its meaning, else it would be useless to show 
such a vision to him. In that short moment, during 
which his inner sight was opened> Jehoshua learned to 
know the fundamental principles of the Cosmos, a 
science which would require many months of instruc- 
tion to be described in words and to be brought to the 
understanding of the not self-luminous intellect. 

The Hierophant then spoke as follows : " I am speak- 
ing only to you who have the right and the power to 
hear me. Firmly close all the doors 3 and exclude all 
the profanes, the sophists and scoffers 4 ; but you, chil- 
dren of the celestial labor, 5 hear my words : Beware of 
passions and evil desires ; beware of erroneous opinions 
and intellectual prejudices. Keep your mind continu- 
ally directed toward the divine source of all existence, 
strive after a continual realization of the presence of 

1 Eusebius* Demonstr. Evang. Lib. I. 3 The external senses. 

2 Origines cent. Cels. p. 341. 4 Prejudices. 

8 Spiritual perception. 






THE MYSTERIOUS BROTHERHOOD. 6j 

the Supreme ; and if you desire to walk upon the Path 
of Light to eternal Happiness, do not forget for even 
one moment, that you are living in the consciousness of 
Him whose power has created the world. He is all 
things, and all things are in Him. He is self-existent, 
pure knowledge, pure wisdom ; and although He is seen 
by no man, there is nothing within the Universe that can 
hide itself from His sight." 1 

Jehoshua had now become a member of the Egyptian 
Brotherhood. He was taught the laws of Nature, and 
made to see that there is nothing dead in Nature, but 
that all forms are manifestations of the one universal 
power of Life. He was taught the causes of the physi- 
cal phenomena occurring in the world of phenomena, 
the nature of Light and Sound, of Heat and Electricity, 
etc. He was also instructed in Astronomy and Medi- 
cine and in the science of Hieroglyphics. 2 

The spiritual nature of Man was explained to him 
and the laws of Reincarnation. How the human monad 
again and again descends to build up a mortal physical 
form and to evolve a new personality at each of its 
visits upon this globe ; that the human forms, which 
we know as men, women, and children, are not the real 
Man, but merely ever-changing aggregations of matter, 
endowed with an ever-changing consciousness, unsub- 
stantial although living illusions, doomed to perish when 
the Spirit retires to its home, to rest from its labor; 

1 Eusebius* Preparat. Evangel. I. i. 3. 

2 Jamblithus, In Vita Pythagor. 



68 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

while the substantial, indivisible, and incorruptible Spirit 
is the real Man, although invisible to the perception of 
mortals. 

He was taught the signification of the sacred sylla- 
ble aum 1 and of certain symbolical signs, 2 including the 
double-interlaced Triangle, the Snake, and the Tau, and 
his office was to guard the Portal of Man, so that 
nothing impure would enter ; for no one was ever ad- 
mitted into the sanctuary of the inner temple, unless he 
first proved himself a faithful guardian of that door by 
which evil thoughts and desires attempt to enter the 
mind. 

A year or more may have thus passed away, when 
the new Pastophores obtained permission to enter the 
second degree, called Necoris. As a preparation for this 
degree he had to undergo a severe fasting, after which 
he was introduced into a grotto, called Endymion. 

This grotto was furnished in a luxuriant manner. It 
was without windows, but lamps that were suspended 
from the ceiling, and fed with perfumed oil, shed a soft 
light through the room. The richest food and the most 
delicious wines were set before the candidate, and he 
was invited to partake ; for now — so they told him — 
he had won the victory, and he might now indulge in 
sensual pleasures without any risk of sin. The most 
beautiful maidens waited upon him, and their bewitching 
smiles told him that he had only to mention a wish, to 

1 Plutarch, De Iride et Osiride. 

2 yamblichus, In Vita Pythagor. 



THE MYSTERIOUS BROTHERHOOD. 69 

see it fulfilled. It was evident that he was an object of 
admiration to them, and that they were willing to be his 
slaves. 

But Jehoshua resisted their tempting wiles. His 
aspirations were for something far higher than the 
gratification of sensual appetites ; the beauty of cor- 
poreal form, however pleasing it may be to the eye, 
could not enslave him who had learned to know the 
beauty of the Spirit, and as the evening approached, 
the fair tempters, with looks full of disappointment and 
unfulfilled desire, disappeared one after another, and 
Jehoshua, after securely locking the door, threw himself 
upon a couch. 

While he was meditating there, a slight noise at- 
tracted his attention, and he saw one of the most beau- 
tiful females that mortal eye ever beheld, entering 
through a secret door, whose existence had escaped his 
observation. She was of most noble appearance and 
stately form, clad in loose, flowing garments, and with 
a sparkling diadem upon her head. Thus may have 
looked the chaste goddess Diana, when she watched the 
sleeping Endymion. An expression full of pity and 
love rested upon her face, as she approached the couch 
where Jehoshua rested. 

"Fear nothing," she said ; "I do not come to tempt, 
but to save thee. I am the daughter of the guardian of 
this temple, and I have learned the danger which is 
threatening thee. Dost thou not know that these 
villanous priests have resolved to kill thee ? for thou 



JO THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

hast forfeited thy life by learning some of their mys- 
teries. Thou, a foreigner, hast learned secrets which 
no one but the Egyptians are permitted to know. This 
evening they have resolved to kill thee, and the murder 
is to be executed even to-night. I have come to save 
thee ; I have made sure thy escape : rise and follow 
me, for I admire thy valor and I do not wish thee to 
perish." 

"Beautiful one," answered Jehoshua, "I will not dis- 
pute thy words ; but if the priests have resolved to kill 
me, let them do so ; for I have promised to obey the 
laws of this brotherhood, and I have no right to 
escape." 

"Is there not," answered the temptress, "a higher 
law than the laws made by these priests ? Is there not 
the law of nature, superior to all other laws ? Does not 
the law of thy nature permit and command thee to save 
thy life?" 

"Spare thy words," answered Jehoshua. "I know 
my duty. I shall remain and await whatever my fate 
may be." 

"Then," said the lady, "I must tell thee what my 
modesty forbids me to say. It is not the life of a fugi- 
tive that I came to offer to thee, but a life of unbounded 
love, a life of happiness and of luxury. Yes," she con- 
tinued after a pause, drawing still nearer to him and 
putting her soft white hand upon his shoulder, " I love 
thee. Look into my eyes and see whether or not what 
I am telling is true. Wilt thou bury thy manhood in 






THE MYSTERIOUS BROTHERHOOD. yi 

these living tombs, to seek after things which exist 
merely in thy imagination ? Come with me, and I will 
give thee a substantial happiness far superior to any 
that thou mayest find within these gloomy walls. Can 
there be any greater happiness for a man than the love 
of a beautiful woman ? I am rich, I am free, I am 
beautiful ; I love thee with all the passionate love of 
which woman is capable. Come with me, and thou 
shalt never repent it." 

"Fair one," answered Jehoshua, "all the earthly ele- 
ments of my material nature are striving to fly to thy 
embrace ; but they are held by the superior will of the 
spirit. I do not seek for happiness within these walls, 
nor could I find contentment in the things which thou 
offerest to me. I seek for happiness in that which is 
not subject to change ; that which thou canst give is 
subject to decay. I reject thy offer." 

"Dare to reject it!" answered the woman. "Dost 
thou know what a woman whose love is spurned can 
do ? I shall not leave thee, for my soul clings to thee ; 
to be separated from thee would be death ! " As she 
spoke these words, she drew a dagger from her belt and 
pointed it to her breast. "Spurn my love," she said, 
" and this weapon will enter my heart ! I will not live 
without thee ; but if I die, my death will also cost thee 
thy life ; for if my dead body is found in this grotto 
to-morrow, thou wilt be accused of being my murderer, 
and be executed for it." Seeing that her threats had 
no effect upon the Neophyte, she threw the dagger 



72 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

upon the floor, and, sinking down at his feet, implored 
him for his love. She tore away her veil, and her luxu- 
riant hair dropped over her shoulders ; tears streamed 
from her eyes, and her appeals ended in sobs. 

"Depart!" sternly answered Jehoshua, and the fair 
one arose and retreated ; but as she disappeared from 
sight, another door opened, and a stream of light en- 
tered the room. The Hierophant and some of the 
Brothers appeared at the entrance, and, congratulating 
him on the victory which he had gained, they led him 
to a large hall, where, after submitting to the ceremony 
of baptism, he was pronounced to be worthy to be 
admitted to a higher degree. 

Thus should he, who is the guardian of the door, 
beware that no secret entrance is left open, by which a 
favorite passion may enter ; and if the temptress should 
enter unaware, during his slumber, he should call to his 
aid the superior power of his awakened Will, and repel 
her. Then will the door of his soul open, Reason will 
enter and guide him by the light of Divine Wisdom 
nearer to permanent Peace. 



THE 

MYSTERIOUS BROTHERHOOD. 

{Continued.) 

To learn the mysteries of the Spirit, we must descend into the 
subterranean caves where the treasures are hidden. 

After a few days of rest and contemplation, Je- 
hoshua was told that the time had arrived when his 
courage and daring would have to undergo a severe 
trial. His eyes were again blindfolded, and he was 
taken to a subterranean cave, into which he had to de- 
scend by means of a ladder. Having arrived at the 
bottom, he removed the bandage from his eyes, accord- 
ing to the directions he had previously received ; but he 
could see no light. The cavern was dark, and at first 
he could not discern any objects ; but he heard hissing 
sounds close by his side. He made a few steps in 
advance, and stepped upon a living thing that was glid- 
ing over the floor, and which immediately wriggled itself 
around his leg. Then the fact immediately came to 
his consciousness that he was in a den of serpents, and 
that to faint would mean to be lost. Gradually his eyes 
became accustomed to the deep darkness, and he dis- 
cerned the eyes and forms of the reptiles that lurked 



74 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

in all the corners. The cavern seemed to be filled with 
snakes of all kinds. Twisted together in disgusting 
knots, some were lying on the floor, and others wormed 
themselves over the rocks. He seated himself upon a 
stone, and soon the snakes began to approach, as if to 
resent his presence. They crawled over his legs, twisted 
themselves around his arms and all over his body. 

At first Jehoshua was horrified ; but his horror was 
only of a moment's duration, for he immediately called 
to his aid his higher consciousness and remembered 
that his terrestrial form, subject to the disgusting em- 
braces of the crawling reptiles, and made of the same 
stuff as they, was not his real Self, but merely a form 
to which he — the divine Man — was for the time being 
attached. This thought enabled him to look upon 
everything that might happen to his body as if he were 
an independent spectator. In this way he appealed for 
aid to his own God, and as he did so, a superior strength, 
a power unknown before, seemed to pervade his whole 
body, and now it seemed as if this power had invested 
him with some property that made him repulsive to the 
serpents ; for soon the reptiles that were in contact 
with his body left him and retired into their holes. 

Thus if man descends to the innermost depths of his 
soul, he may find it infested with poisonous serpents 
and venomous reptiles, the symbols of the brood of 
passions and evil desires ; but if he calls to his aid the 
divine spirit of Wisdom, the persecutions will cease and 
peace will return. 






THE MYSTERIOUS BROTHERHOOD. 75 

After having passed through this severe trial, he was 
released from his prison and led again to the temple. 

For a second time his spiritual eyes were opened by 
the magic power of the Hierophant, and he was made 
to behold in his vision a Griffin and a turning wheel 
with four spokes. Then the whole process of Evolution 
became clear to his understanding, and he saw how in 
the course of millions of ages, worlds upon worlds had 
been evolved from the incomprehensible centre. He 
beheld waves of Life passing from planet to planet, and 
each fiery orb, each globe, each solar system, had pecu- 
liar forms of its own, and all these various forms were 
manifestations of one and the same Supreme Power, 
that men call " God," and formed out of its own sub- 
stance. 

The air, the earth, and the water were filled with 
forms of life, having bodies of a kind of matter too re- 
fined to be seen by mortal eyes. Some were luminous, 
others dark, and the regions above the sphere of the 
Earth were inhabited by beings of a seemingly super- 
natural beauty. He saw the Natitre-spirits of the four 
elements. He saw what Man had been in the distant 
past and what he would be at a future period of time 
far beyond the calculation of mortals. He saw how the 
gross material elements of which the Earth is now com- 
posed, would in the far-distant future be changed into a 
substance of a superior and ethereal kind, so that what 
we now call " Earth " would be like water, and what we 
call "Water" like air, and what we call "Air" like the 



\ 



76 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

ether of space, and with the transformation of all things, 
Man himself would enter into a superior state of exist- 
ence. 

The science which deals with these problems is far too 
grand and extensive to be more than merely touched 
upon in these pages, nor would it benefit the uninitiated 
reader, if we were to enter into its details ; for as long 
as the interior perception which enables men to per- 
ceive these things is not opened, such a discussion will 
be a mere matter of speculation, serving more for 
amusement than for the attainment of knowledge. 

In this degree he was taught the great law of Karma; 
that is to say, the law of Cause and Effect, not merely 
upon the physical plane, where the law of Mechanics 
exists, but in that higher realm, where divine Justice 
rules supreme, where Good finds its own reward, and 
Evil its own punishment. He saw that whatever man 
may think or do, would produce a corresponding reac- 
tion upon himself, and that he who benefited others is 
thereby benefiting himself, while he who injures others 
is thereby decreeing his own punishment. He saw that 
the acts of men are the external symbols of their inte- 
rior lives, and that every thought and act has a tendency 
to repeat itself. Thoughts seemed to him like beings 
struggling for life, seeking to become embodied in acts ; 
and if they were once thus embodied, they clung to 
their life in the same way as man clings to his, but the 
I power which invested these thoughts with life was the 
Will, and unless man's thoughts were kept alive by his 



THE MYSTERIOUS BROTHERHOOD. *]>] 

Will, they died and putrefied like the corporeal things 
upon the physical plane. 

The password of this degree was Heve, and its under- 
standing conveyed a knowledge of the bisexual nature 
of aboriginal Man. 1 

The length of time during which the Necoris had to 
remain in the second degree, before he was permitted 
to enter the third, called Melanephores, depended on his 
own progress. Many never attained any higher than 
the second degree ; but those who were permitted to 
advance higher had to pass through the Portal of Death; 
for this was the name of the door through which they 
who desired to obtain powers which belong to a higher 
than merely personal existence had to enter, before they 
could acquire them. 

Without hesitation Jehoshua followed those who were 
appointed to guide him. They descended into the 
tombs, where the mummies were kept and which were 
to be a living tomb to him, if he did not succeed in lib- 
erating himself therefrom by his own magic power. The 
room which he entered was filled with corpses of the 
dead, while in the midst of the chamber stood the sarcoph- 
agus of Osiris still overflowing with blood. The Par- 
askites — i.e. the men who opened the bodies of the dead — 
and the Heroi — who attended to the embalming — were at 
their work. From thence he entered into another room, 
where he was met by all the Melanephores, dressed in 
black. They took him before the King, and the latter, 

1 Clem. Alexander, In Protept. 






78 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

addressing him in a very kind manner, advised him to 
desist from further attempts to penetrate still deeper 
into the mysteries, and to remain satisfied with that 
which he had already gained. He praised the Neophyte 
for his courage and virtues and told him that it were 
better for him now to remain contented and to desist 
from further research. He told him that if he would 
do so, he would be highly honored by all on account of 
the knowledge he had already gained ; and in token of 
the high esteem in which he held the Neophyte, the 
king took his own golden crown from his head and 
offered it to him. But Jehoshua, understanding the 
meaning of this symbol, threw the crown down upon 
the floor and stepped upon it with his foot, saying that 
it was not his object to be admired and to gratify his 
ambition for fame or to be praised by men ; but that he 
desired wisdom and desired it for its own sake alone. 

As he did so, a cry of indignation arose from those 
present and a ceremony took place which upon the ex- 
ternal plane represented the well-known internal truth, 
that 'Ambition is the king of all passions and that to 
give up one's Ambition is like giving up one's own self; 
for man's soul being made up to a great extent of de- 
sires, dies the mystic death, when he kills his ruling 
desire.A It is then "as if the heart were bleeding and 
the whole life of man seems to be utterly dissolved." 1 

This was the terrible ordeal through which Jehoshua 
had to pass, and it is the ordeal through which every one 

1 M. C. " Light on the Path." 



THE MYSTERIOUS BROTHERHOOD. 79 

will have to pass, before he can enter the Temple of 
Wisdom. 

Let not the reader suppose that we are describing a 
farce, such as may be seen enacted in some lodge of 
some modern "secret society." Whether the events 
described in these pages ever took place on the exter 
nal or on the internal plane, or on both, the reader may 
decide for himself. If such things are enacted merely 
externally without taking place internally, then they art 
mere shams. Every external act which is not a true 
representation of internal life is a sham, and our modern 
civilization is made up of such shams. Our secret soci- 
eties have come into possession of some of the forms 
and ceremonies used by the ancient Egyptians; but 
they have merely the form; the spirit went away long 
ago. 

The judgment of the departed soul before Pluto, 
Rhadamantes, and Minos was then enacted; for when 
the king of Ambition in the soul of man dies, his 
daughter Vanity dies with him, and in its place arises a 
sense of one's unworthiness. The accusing, judging, and 
revenging angels then appear in the soul, until the tor- 
tured heart sends its despairing cries to the Redeemer, 
the Truth; when the celestial powers awaken within, to 
comfort the soul and guide her to the harbor of Peace. 

During this process or ceremony the whole of Je- 
hoshua's past life, with all the minutest details that ever 
took place within his mental organization, appeared 
before his vision; but when the initiation was ended, 



80 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

he knew that the lower elements within his soul had 
died and that he himself had been changed into another 
being. He then received the special instructions be- 
longing to this degree, and he was especially shown the 
sanctity of all life and the full meaning of the words : 
" Thou shalt not kill!' 

While he remained in this degree, the hierogram- 
matical art of writing, the history of Egypt, geography, 
cosmology, and astronomy were taught him; but his 
principal occupation, in this as in all other degrees, was 
the cultivation of the power of Intuition, by which man 
may know the truth and attain wisdom, independent of 
books or external information and without the necessity 
of adopting the opinions of others. 

For a long time Jehoshua remained in tombs, attend- 
ing to the disposal of the bodies of the dead ; nor was 
any one of the members of this degree ever permitted to 
leave them during the rest of their natural lives, unless 
they attained that magic power, known to the Adept, by 
which the astral body of man may leave at will the prison 
house of terrestrial body. Those who were not able to 
acquire this power had to remain in their tombs, and 
their duty was to attend to the embalming and the 
burial of the dead. 

Thus the souls of those who are incapable of entering 
a higher state of consciousness during their terrestrial 
lives, will have to remain within their living tombs of 
gross matter, overshadowed by the darkness of igno- 
rance, engaged in ministering to that which is worthless 









THE MYSTERIOUS BROTHERHOOD. 8l 

and without eternal life, and to preserve from decay use- 
less memories of terrestrial things. They will con- 
tinue to follow their worthless occupations and be 
servants of empty forms and illusions until the angel 
of death releases them from their prisons, to lead them 
from the darkness of matter into the eternal darkness 
beyond. 



THE HIGHER DEGREES. 

He who thoroughly knows his own self, knows everything. 

In attempting to describe some of the mysteries of 
the higher degrees in the Egyptian Brotherhood, we are 
attempting to enter upon a field where only those can 
enter who have themselves obtained some experience of 
practical Occultism ; for how could the magic processes 
that took place in the "Battle of the Shadows" be de- 
scribed to persons whose knowledge consists merely of 
the information they have received from an age which 
denies that magic or spiritual powers exist ? It will re- 
quire perhaps centuries of scientific investigation before 
our sceptics will understand the magic power of the spirit- 
ually awakened Will, and before they can be brought to 
a knowledge that feats of Magic do not belong to the 
realm of the fable, and it may require many centuries 
more, before such powers will become the property of 
the many. 

Our age is the age of what is called "Reason," i.e. 
semi-animal Reason, not enlightened by Divine Wisdom, 
but drawing inferences from merely external things. It 
is ruled by those powers which are allegorically repre- 
sented in the Bible by the " Pharisees and the Scribes," 
whose knowledge is based upon deductions drawn from 



THE HIGHER DEGREES. 83 

the observation of illusive appearances, which they mis- 
take for the Real, while the real is unknowable to them. 
In proportion as this fallible reasoning power has in- 
creased in strength, have men become unconscious of 
true Spirituality; that is to say, of the existence of a 
power to perceive spiritual and fundamental truths. 
With the loss of spiritual knowledge they have also 
lost the spiritual Power necessary to control the invisi- 
ble spiritual forces. True Gnostic has become a thing of 
the past, agnosticism raises its head and boasts of its 
ignorance, and Science has become materialized so much 
that she can deal with nothing but the most gross and 
sensually perceptible things. 

And yet the world is still full of Magic. The magic 
power of Love still exercises its influence over the 
hearts; the magic of Imagination still makes men 
mournful or glad ; the Will of the strong still controls 
by its magic power the mind of the weak, and the fool- 
ish are still ruled by the superior magic power of the 
spirit of those who are wise ; but such wonders like that 
of the growth of a tree, do not surprise us, merely be- 
cause we are accustomed to witness them every day. 

The Egyptian Adepts and Magicians may not have 
been in possession of all that our modern science knows 
in regard to the relations which exist between external 
phenomena ; but they had a method, known only to few 
in our present age, to develop the power to look into 
that realm called the invisible, but which is a world far 
more real and substantial than the so-called visible 



84 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

world. Men are prone to jump at conclusions drawn 
from sensual observation and to regard the visible side 
of nature as the actual world and to reject that which is 
Beyond sensual perception ; but even a superficial reflec- 
tion will convince man that the terms "visible" and 
" invisible" are merely relative; for whether or not a 
thing may be seen by us, depends not merely on its 
own nature, but also on the construction and quality of 
the organs of our perception. What may be seen by 
one, may be invisible to another who is devoid of the 
organ of sight ; and what may be invisible to many, may 
be visible to those whose inner powers of perception 
have become open. 

The fourth degree of the mysterious Brotherhood was 
called " The Battle of the Shadows!' 1 In this degree 
the Christophores — as he was now called — was taught 
the nature of Good and Evil and how to conquer Evil 
by Good. He was taught how to cut off the head of 
the beautiful Gorgon? without hesitating on account of 
her almost supernaturally beautiful form. He was in- 
structed in the art of Necromancy, i.e. the art to deal 
with the astral bodies of the dead and with those dan- 
gerous beings, called Elementals, who inhabit the astral 
world, and to make them subservient to their will. Woe 
to him whom the power of spiritual Will deserted even 
for one moment during these trials ; the principles of 
Evil which he attempted to subject to his Will would 

1 Tertullian, " De Militis Corona." 

2 Medusa. 






THE HIGHER DEGREES. 85 

then become his masters, and insanity or death was the 
result. 

/ (There is no relative Good without relative Evil. 
There is no man so pure, as not to have some animal 

. elements within his constitution, and were there such a 

! man, he would not be able to develop higher ; for it is 
this very animal element from which the soul of man 
draws its nourishment and strength to rise higher and 
to become more spiritual. Not to destroy, but to make 
use of the elements of evil in man for the purpose of 
accomplishing good, is the object of the higher educa- 
tion. When the higher life begins to awaken within 
the soul and the light of the Spirit penetrates into the 
regions of the Elementals, these animal Egos begin to 
revolt and to rise to the surface. They may even appear 
in objective form and persecute their creator. Then 
the dread Dweller of the Threshold may show his face. 

I He is nothing else but a product of man's own imagina- 
tion, but nevertheless living and as real as any other 
living thing among the so-called realities of this world, 
and if the candidate for initiation is subject to fear, he 
may become his victim, for the Dweller of the Threshold 
will then again and with increased power take posses- 
sion of his mind. 

There is a region in the soul of man in which such 
Dwellers reside. In very degraded persons this region 
swarms with living, semi-developed or full-grown animal 
principles and subjective monstrosities of all kinds 
and under certain conditions, especially if the physical 



86 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

organism is weakened by disease, they may — so to say 
— step out of their centre, and assume an objective 
form, clothing themselves in the grosser elements 
of matter and becoming visible even to the external 
senses. 1 

But if the candidate in that holy Brotherhood suc- 
ceeded in overcoming all these obstacles, he became a 
partaker of the Demiurgos 2 and in possession of abso- 
lute Truth. 3 The bitter cup which he was made to drink, 
caused him to rise above all earthly ills arising from his 
lower nature, and he received his daily food from the 
King.^ His name was then entered into the Book of 
Life, and he became one of the judges of the country. 
His emblem was an Owl, representing his, the goddess 
of Nature ; he was presented with a palm leaf and an 
olive branch, the emblems of Peace. The "password" 
of that degree was 10 A, 5 and the understanding of its 
exoteric signification involved a knowledge of the crea- 
tive principle in Nature. Henceforth he received his 
instructions from no man, but from the Demiurgic 
Mind. 

He who had attained the degree of Christophores was 
entitled to apply to the Demiurgos for the still higher 
degree of Balahate. In this degree he was permitted 

1 Abundant evidence of such cases may be found in the Acta Sancto- 
rum, although the accounts related therein are treated as fables even by 
the clergy, who cannot find a rational explanation for them. Modern 
Spiritualism furnishes similar examples. 

2 The creative power in nature. 4 Diodorus Siculus, Lib. i. 

3 Athenceus, Lib. 9. 5 Jehovah. 



THE HIGHER DEGREES. 87 

to see Typhoon 1 in his terrible form ; of endless extent, 
containing within himself all that exists in the Uni- 
verse ; the All-creator and All-destroyer, 

" With eyes and faces, infinite in form, 

The everlasting Cause, a mass of Light, 

In every region hard to look upon ; 

Bright as the blaze of burning fire and sun, 

On every side, and vast beyond all bounds." 2 

But the Balahate had awakened to a full consciousness 
of the immortal principle within, and was no longer 
terrified to see the destruction of all changeable things. 
He now knew the nature of the Secret Fire that regen- 
erates the world and which renders him who comes into 
its possession immortal. 

In the sixth degree the Adept was instructed by the 
Demiurgos in all the secrets of Astrology ; that is to 
say, in the science of the spiritual aspects of the stars ; 
he learned to know the directions of the spiritual life- 
currents, pervading the Soul of the Universe ; he became 
even a being superior to the Devas and Angels and in 
possession of all spiritual powers. 

The seventh and highest degree, called Pancah, could 
not be applied for, but was conferred by the power of 
divine grace upon those who were willing to receive it. 
In this divine degree, the holiest of holies, the ultimate 
mystery was revealed to the spiritual perception of the 
Adept. He received a Cross, which he had to wear 

1 Divinity. 2 /. Davies, Bhagavad Gita, xi. 14. 



ss 



THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 



continually during his terrestrial life, 1 the hair upon his 
head was cut off, 2 he received the key to the under- 
standing of all the mysteries, 3 he obtained the privilege 
to elect the king of the country, 4 or — to speak in plain 
words and leave off allegorical expressions — his soul 
became one with the ruler of All, and he entered into 
the essence of God. 

1 Fufius, Lib. ii. Cap. 29. 

2 Fierius, Lib. 32. 

8 Plutarch, " De amore fraterno." 
4 Synesus, " De Providentia." 



THE WISDOM RELIGION. 

The inner laws of the universe can be known by studying the 
inner laws of that little world called " Man." 

It has not been ascertained how long Jehoshua Ben- 
Pandira remained in Egypt, nor what degrees he attained 
in the Holy Brotherhood ; but it is believed that he 
underwent many of the severe trials to which those who 
desired to be initiated into the mysteries were subjected. 
He was taught many of these sublime secrets, or, to 
express it more correctly : As the bud of a Lotus 
flower gradually opens under the influence of the sun- 
light, so his mind opened to the understanding of the 
divine mysteries of the Wisdom Religion. He perceived 
that God had a spiritual and a material aspect ; that He 
is all things, and that for this cause " He hath many 
names, because he is the One Father, and that He also 
hath no name, for He is the Father of All"; 1 — that 
this one and universal Father had created the world in 
his own Mind, endowed it with His own Life, and thrown 
it into objectivity by His own Will. 

He perceived and realized that this divine essence 
which caused the universe to take form and to grow, is 
the same that forms the corner-stone of the living tem- 

1 Hermes Trismegistus, V. 33. 






90 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

pie of God, called Man, and that the essence constituting 
the foundation and the innermost centre of Man is in no 
way different from that of the universal God, and that 
therefore " earthly man is a little god in a mortal body, 
while the God of the Universe is an immortal self-exist- 
ent Man." 1 He found no death in the universe, but a 
continual change of form, while the Life that causes 
these changes of form remains always the same. That 
which is imperfect has to be remodelled and to become 
perfect ; but that which is perfect and therefore eternal 
requires no further change. 

He saw that the whole of Nature is a thing of Life, 
subject — like all living beings — to periods of activity 
and rest ; that after a day of activity, lasting perhaps 
for millions of ages, the great phantasmagoria constitut- 
ing the universe ceases to be manifest, and is followed 
by a night of equal duration, during which all things 
exist in a subjective condition in the mind of the creator, 
until " God " again awakens from his slumber, to speak 
once more the divine command : 

LET THERE BE LIGHT! 

Then ends the night; the mystic Sun appears, 
Filling all space with Life and Harmony, 
With Consciousness and Sound. Again begins 
The Wheel to turn, and the celestial Powers, 
The Master-builders of the Universe, 2 
Whose work had ceased with the evening tide, 
Begin again their labor. Glowing globes 

1 Ibid. IV. 193. 2 The Dhyan Chohans. 



THE WISDOM RELIGION. 9 1 

Of radiant matter, luminous and bright, 

Condense and clothe themselves in varied hues, 

Evolving shells of rocks and precious stones. 

And mother earth puts on her festive dress, 

To bid a joyful welcome to her children. 

Plants, animals, appear ; at last comes Man y 

The king, a spirit of ethereal shape, 

Form'd of the essence that produces gods, 

Surrounded by the paradise which God 

Created in his sphere. He is the Lord 

Of every living thing, the masterpiece 

Of the constructor of the universe ; 

His substance is the Light, his thoughts divine, 

His wisdom great, his happiness supreme. 

Thus might he live eternally, in bliss 

Unspeakable, communing with himself, 

Unconscious of that lower sense of self, 

Which causes isolation of the form. 

But in the womb of Matter dwells desire, 

The ancient tempter. Man averts his eyes 

From his celestial source, and he begins 

To sink into the darkness. Denser grows 

And more compact his form, as he descends 

To seek for knowledge in the realm of Matter. 

Imprisoned in the form, his senses close 

To the perception of celestial things, 

And senses of a grosser kind appear, 

Fit merely to behold the things of Earth, 

For "where man's treasure is, there is his heart"; 

Uniting with the object he desires, 

He shares its nature. The immortal soul 

Combin'd with mortal clay is rendered mortal, 

And mortal things transformed may rise up 

Beyond the region of mortality. 



92 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

Spirit is Life ; but Matter has no life, 

Which it may claim its own ; the source of Life 

Is that celestial Sun, invisible 

To mortals, but eternal, self-existent 

And glorious, in whose resplendent rays 

All beings move and live, by whom we all 

Exist, whose altar is the heart of Man. 

This is the "Fall of Man" and the descent 

Of the bright Spirit to the realms of darkness, 

Occurring now as in those ancient times, 

When Man was tempted by the mythic snake 

For men are still attracted by desire, 

Appearing in the beauteous form of lust, 

Or in the shape of gold or love of fame, 

Appealing to his sense of selfishness, 

And thus degrading him, and many sink 

To lower depths, while others rise again 

By throwing off desire for earthly things, 

And gaining knowledge of celestial truths 

By bursting through the misty veil of matter 

That hides them from the light. 

Desire to live 
And to enjoy the pleasures of this life 
Produces birth in living mortal forms ; 
Then follows life with all its sufferings, 
Its evanescent joys, old age, and death, 
And all the ills that follow those whose souls 
Remain attached to matter; after this 
Comes birth again, and thus the wheel revolves 
Unceasingly. 

But the celestial Sun 
Of happiness continues to shine, 
Sending his rays of love, of light, and life 



THE WISDOM RELIGION. 



93 



Into the hearts of men and filling them 
With longings for their former state of bliss. 
And some perceive the light and hear the voice 
Of wisdom speaking in their darkened souls, 
Speaking to them: "O men! Let there be Light!" 
And waking from their sleep they start and listen, 
Like one awakening from some idle dream. 
Some realize the presence of the Truth 
Within their hearts and follow the Redeemer, 
And throwing off that foolish love of self, 
Their minds expand beyond the narrow limits 
Of personality. Then can the prison house 
Of flesh no longer hold the glorious spirit, 
Which gained freedom from the love of self. 



This is the history of man's redemption 
Without a passport from a man-made priest. 
The great Redeemer speaks to every man, 
But many hear the voice and sink again 
To sleep, preferring darkness to the light. 

What is the cause of all our suffering, 

But the desires that chain us to the flesh? 

No one is free, but he who has outlived 

All love of earthly things, all love of self. 

What are the forms of life that please the eye, 

But evanescent clouds? and what is man 

In his corporeal form but air and dust? 

He lords the earth to-day and feeds the worms 

Of earth to-morrow. Who but God can claim 

To be immortal? Therefore seek the God 

Who speaks within thy heart, and say with him : 

"Let there be Light!" — Seek for the light that shines 

Within thy heart and learn to know thyself. 

Learn to adore, and thou shalt find the Truth. 



THE TEMPTATION. 

There is no absolute evil. A house divided against itself would 
fall: an evil power, being evil in the absolute, would be evil in 
regard to itself and destroy itself. Evil is necessary to afford expe- 
rience, and experience leads to ultimate good ; but those who employ 
evil means to attain good results associate themselves with evil, and 
by creating evil will perish with it. 

Jehoshua had attained in Egypt some of the lower 
degrees of Adeptship, when he was advised by his 
superiors to return to Palestine for the purpose of 
teaching the truth to his countrymen and to lift them 
up from their state of degradation and superstition ; 
for practical occultism does not consist in merely lead- 
ing a life of contemplation and virtue and attending to 
one's own spiritual culture. To do so would after all 
be only a refined state of selfishness. It is equally 
necessary to do external work ; that is to say, to work 
for the benefit of others, to help to drive back the 
powers of darkness and ignorance, to assist in the work 
of ennobling mankind, and to raise it up to a higher 
level in the scale of evolution. 

Such a work for others brings with it its own reward ; 
for as it has been well said by one of the greatest 
thinkers and poets, 1 "A quiet life in a solitude is use- 

1 Schiller. 






THE TEMPTATION. 95 

ful for the development of one's talents ; but for the 
strengthening of the characte7% an active co-operation in 
the battle of Life is required." 

Jehoshua had attained a high degree of that interior 
power of perception which enables man to hear the 
voice of divine Inspiration speak within the heart with- 
out any danger of misunderstanding. To accomplish 
this it is necessary not merely to become a master over 
one's evil desires, but also to keep the disorderly intel- 
lectual powers of the mind subject to the control of the 
Spirit, so that the Intellect may become our friend and 
servant, but cease to assume the place belonging to 
Divine Wisdom. The Intellect is easily influenced by 
the desires of the lower self, but Wisdom is above all 
selfish considerations ; she recognizes no personal claims 
which are not in accordance with eternal Truth. The 
Intellect is changeable and mortal ; Wisdom is eternal, 
unchangeable, and immortal. The Intellect can only 
become immortal by amalgamating with Wisdom. If 
the decisions of Wisdom and those of the Intellect are 
in harmony and identical with each other, then the 
mortal Intellect rises up to the state of immortal divine 
Intelligence. 

Jehoshua returned to Palestine. His object was to 
convince his countrymen that God will only help those 
who help themselves, and that all external circum- 
stances are the results of interior conditions ; that if 
they desired to extricate themselves from their deplor- 
able condition, they would have to call to their aid the 



9 6 



THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 



divine power existing within themselves, instead of re- 
maining indolent and expecting external help from a 
God such as they had created within their own imagi- 
nation. 

There were at the time of which we are writing a 
number of people in Galilee of more advanced thought 
than the rest. They were known as the Nazarenes ; 
the majority of them were living on the east side of 
the river Jordan and in the vicinity of the lake Tibe- 
rias, andy<?/z;z the Baptist was their prophet. This man, 
originally of the priestly caste of the Levites, was 
looked upon by the Pharisees as being a renegade to 
their order, because his doctrines did not conform 
to their orthodox views. He had resigned his sacer- 
dotal office at the temple, with all its emoluments, and 
chosen a life of poverty. Clad in rough skins, his noble 
face almost hidden by his shaggy hair and flowing 
beard, his appearance was awe-inspiring, and his voice 
was strong, re-echoing in the hearts of men like the 
sound of thunder that reverberates through the moun- 
tains. 

"Repent!" he cried; "the day of judgment is near. 
Listen no longer to the seductions of sensual life, but 
seek the divine life within you. I do not ask you to 
give up the pleasures of life for the purpose of becom- 
ing misanthropes, but to realize that there is something 
far higher than merely animal pleasures or erroneous 
speculations ; andjjf you rise up to the higher regions 
of thought and learn to know your own higher nature, 



THE TEMPTATION. g? 

sensual things will lose their attraction for you, and 
you will renounce them as worthless objects in the 
same sense as a grown-up man renounces the toys with 
which he used to play when a child, and for which he 
has no further use,; I baptize you with the water of 
truth by directing your thoughts to that which is eter- 
nal ; but the understanding I cannot give, for that must 
come from Wisdom, which is greater than Reason. 
First comes thought, and afterwards comes that interior 
Illumination by which men are baptized with Fire from 
the Holy Spirit of Truth, that descends upon those 
who are pure in heart, like a white dove descending from 
heaven. Man may be led up to the truth by argumen- 
tation, but he can only be saved by knowledge. Reason 
is the prophet, but Wisdom is the Redeemer. Thought 
must precede knowledge ; but without the light of 
divine Wisdom thought is like a voice in the wilder- 
ness, calling for help ; an intellect without Love becomes 
easily lost in the mazes of speculations and misleading 
opinions. Therefore you, who desire to be saved, re- 
pent of your errors ; give up your selfishness, that causes 
you to seek for knowledge merely on account of the 
benefits you hope to derive therefrom ; open your eyes 
to see the true saviour, the light of Wisdom, which you 
may find below the dark clouds of ignorance by which 
your heart is surrounded." 

The fame of John the Baptist had spread all over 
the country ; even the embodiment of selfishness, the 
great king Herodes, had heard his voice that sounded 






9 8 



THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 



like the roar of a lion. This man, being a great profli- 
gate and entirely attracted by sensual pleasures, would 
not listen to the warning voice of Reason, but at the 
same time he was a great coward. He was afraid that 
what John the Baptist said might be true, after all. He 
did what the majority of men do at this day when their 
reason comes in conflict with their desires. He refused 
to listen to John the Baptist ; he had him arrested and 
put into a prison, so that he might not be disturbed by 
his voice, and be left in the undisturbed enjoyment 
of the beautiful Herodias. 

For some time Jehoshua remained with this prophet 
of the desert and his disciples. He taught them some 
of the truths he had learned in Egypt from the books 
of Hermes Trismegistus, called in Egypt Meti, 1 and 
his companions wrote down some of the fragments 
he taught, and these fragments were afterwards trans- 
mitted to their successors. 

After the imprisonment of John the Baptist, Jehoshua 
retired for a while into the wilderness, to devote him- 
self to meditation and self-examination. There are 
moments in the life of every man when he feels the 
necessity to retire within himself and to look into his 
own interior soul. If he succeeds in locking the door 
of the chamber of his mind against all sensual thoughts 
that may arise from external influences, to keep the 
wandering thoughts steady, " as a lamp sheltered from 
the wind does not flicker," to plunge down into the 

1 The Gospel according to Matthew. 



THE TEMPTATION. 



99 



mysterious depths of his own innermost being, then 
may he find the Divinity within his own soul. 

Let not this be called a fancy. Useless would it be 
for a man who has not found his own higher self, to 
imagine that he found it and to believe himself to be a 
god. Such an assumption would be sure to bring on 
his perdition. If the internal god reveals himself to 
man, he does so in a manner which leaves no room for 
doubt ; but which must be experienced before it can 
be known, and which can therefore not be revealed to 
those who refuse to receive him. 

There are vast solitudes in Judea, where the blazing 
sun sends his rays into the treeless desert. There 
nothing is to be seen but bare rocks and loose stones 
filling the dried-up beds of the creeks, wherein during 
the rainy season water collects, but where during the 
rest of the year no moisture is found. No life is there, 
except perhaps a snake gliding over the sand and an 
eagle floating high up in the air watching his prey ; the 
heated air scorches the parched lips, and all around is 
desolation and death, while overhead expands the sky, 
the emblem of Infinity. 

There are solitudes within the human soul, to which 
man may retire. There are deserts where nothing is 
to be seen but a jumble of adopted opinions and theo- 
logical doctrines, and where reason looks in vain for 
a drop of the water of truth. Sometimes lakes and 
rivers appear at a distance ; but as we approach, that 
which appeared to be true proves to be merely a mirage, 



IOO 



THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA 



a work of delusion. Things that look in the moonlight 
of external reason like precious fruits or like jewels and 
pearls are often found upon examination in the sunlight 
of Wisdom to be nothing but worthless rubbish. Over 
our head shines the sun of Truth in the infinite realm, 
while in the dark caverns of the soul lurk the snakes 
of evil desires. 

To some such desert Jehoshua retired, and there he 
fought once more the great battle with his own self. 
He looked within his soul and he found therein reflected 
the condition of mankind ; for(man is an integral part 
of Humanity, and in proportion as we learn to know our 
own soul we lose all sense of separateness and realize 
that we are one with all mankind ; we are in humanity, 
and humanity is within ourselves. As he looked in that 
magic mirror, — the Soul, — he saw therein reflected 
the images of all the miseries produced by ignorance, 
and the ardent desire arose in his heart to save man- 
kind from error ; to kill the monster of darkness, to 
destroy once again the golden calf of self-adulation, 
and to restore the worship of the Spirit of Wisdom, 
whose temple is in the soul. While he thought of 
becoming a saviour to mankind, the sense of the "/" 
arose in his consciousness, and the tempter approached 
him in the shape of Ambition, the king of all the powers 
of eviL 

" Powerful one," whispered the tempter, " if thou 
wilt save mankind, cause these stones to become bread, 
enable men to employ Intelligence for base purposes ; 



THE TEMPTATION. IOI 

for they will care little for spiritual truths unless they 
can make them serve some temporal purpose. Their 
material necessities are nearer to them than the things 
of whose existence they know nothing, or whether they 
be at all useful to them. Men do not care for the 
truth ; they only care for the material benefits which 
may result from its knowledge. Go and improve the 
material condition of mankind. Teach them how to 
make gold and to gain easily comfort and luxury. 
Then, when their terrestrial wants are provided for, 
will they find time to attend to their spiritual salvation. 
Go and teach them the hidden secrets of nature, so 
that they may kill their enemies and acquire riches. 
Feed the hungry and save them the trouble of work- 
ing, liberate those who are slaves and too indolent to 
help themselves, and thou wilt be worshipped by all." 

But Jehoshua, rising above the plane of selfishness, 
repulsed the evil one, and said : " Material wealth and 
comfort is not all that mankind requires ; their spiritual 
condition is of far greater importance than temporal 
benefits given to them without their own efforts. The 
power for good can only grow by a constant battle with 
evil. It is well that man should learn all the external 
conditions by which he is surrounded, but every gratifi- 
cation of his selfish desires only calls into existence a 
legion of other desires and fastens still stronger the 
links by which he is chained to Matter. ' Evil ' is as 
much a necessary element in the process of evolution 
as 'good,' for the only way to freedom is through suffer- 



102 THE LIFE OF J EH O SHU A. 

ing ; only he who has fought in the battle can come out 
victorious." 

"But," answered the evil one, "how wilt thou con- 
vince mankind that this terrestrial world is merely a 
world of illusions, and that there is a higher state of 
existence ? If thou couldst perform wonders and mira- 
cles, they would perhaps be willing to believe. Cast 
thyself down from the pinnacle of Jerusalem, degrade 
thyself by descending to the plane of the intellectual 
understanding, and men will believe in thee. Men do 
not love the divine truth, because they do not know it ; 
and before they will seek to know it, they must be made 
to believe that it exists. If thou canst make its exist- 
ence plausible by performing some wonderful feats, 
then will they be willing to make a bargain and to 
exchange terrestrial baubles for celestial treasures. 
Does not the light eternally shine into darkness, and 
does the darkness believe that it exists ? " 

To this the Higher Self of Jehoshua replied : " Divine 
Wisdom belongs to the realm of Light, and cannot 
descend to the intellectual comprehension of mortals ; 
those who seek for the truth must themselves rise up to 
its understanding. 1 Men must come up to divine wis- 
dom; it cannot descend to their level. Moreover, it is 
not a mere belief in the truth, which will save mankind ; 

1 When the truth was brought before the judgment seat of the intellect, 
and requested to prove intellectually his claims, " he never answered him 
a word; inasmuch that the governor (of the mind) marvelled greatly." 
— Matthew xxvii. 12. 



THE TEMPTATION. IO3 

they should have their own knowledge. Those who 
cannot have faith without external evidence, are not in the 
possession of knowledge. • Let them open their eyes for 
the perception of spiritual things and cease to cling to 
adopted beliefs. Let them seek for the truth within 
themselves, and not within the opinions of another." 

"Wilt thou, then," said the demon of Self, "take 
away the crutches with which poor Humanity hobbles 
along ? Wilt thou destroy her toys and awaken her 
from the peaceful slumber in which she finds repose ? 
Dost thou know what will be the consequences of such 
a rash act ? Men do not wish to be free from creeds 
and opinions, for they possess no knowledge. They hate 
freedom, and prefer to cling to the slavery of their creeds. 
They do not want to be their own masters, but they 
must have some one to obey. If thou destroyest 
their favorite creed to-day, they will have another one 
to-morrow. What should they do without a creed ? 
They are afraid to think for themselves ; they must have 
some man to think for them. Thou wilt make them 
free, but thou shalt not succeed. Fasten their chains, 
and they will be happy. Give them a herdsman to fol- 
low, and they will be contented. Give them somebody 
to obey. Give them by all means an Authority in which 
they may believe. Behold, I am the Devil of Self; my 
kingdom extends all over the world. Fall down and 
sacrifice thy dignity to me, enter my being, appeal to 
men's love of self, and you will be the ruler of the world." 

As he spoke these words, the demon expanded in size, 



104 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

and his body, like an immense cloud of darkness, seemed 
to extend all over the surface of the earth, and Jehoshua 
saw that the thoughts and actions of the vast majority 
of men and women upon this globe were all ruled by 
selfishness. There were almost none to be found who 
loved Divine Wisdom for her own sake, while all the 
rest merely pretended to love her, because they expected 
favors from her. They loved the Truth merely on 
account of the benefits that might be derived from its 
knowledge here or in the hereafter, and thus they did 
not love Divine Wisdom, but merely her gifts. Not 
being able to know the Truth, because they were not 
attracted to it by an unselfish love for Divine Wisdom, 
they were satisfied with anything, however false, which 
was represented to them as being the truth, and thus 
they worshipped their own idols. But there were a few 
who actually loved the truth for its own sake, and they 
appeared like luminous stars within that dark mass of 
ignorance. 

But as Jehoshua looked still deeper into the hearts of 
men, he found that this love of self was merely a prop- 
erty of the surface of the shell of which men are com- 
posed, and that there was, after all, a germ of genuine 
love of the truth contained within the depths of every 
human heart. If this germ could be developed and 
brought to the surface, and the love of self be made to 
occupy a back-seat, then would the love for absolute Good 
come to the front, and men would learn to know the 
Truth. The love of self is inherent in human nature, 






THE TEMPTATION. 



I05 



and it cannot be entirely suppressed as long as men live 
in corporeal forms ; but it can be made to appear as a 
matter of secondary consideration, while an unselfish 
attendance to duty should be a matter of the greatest 
importance to all. 

Therefore the Divinity of Jehoshua arose to the sur- 
face, and said to the Demon of Self : " Get thee behind 
me, Satan!''' and as he spoke these words, the demon 
shrank into minute proportions and disappeared from 
sight, and a flood of light entered the soul of Jehoshua. 
He now became fully conscious that he had entered a 
new state of existence ; an interior Illumination took 
place, and he saw that his personality was not his real 
self, but merely an instrument which he had created 
for the purpose of fulfilling a mission upon this Earth. 
He had now gained a great victory over his own illusive 
self and entered into the sanctuary of the Temple of 
Truth. 






THE SERMON UPON THE 
MOUNT. 

The Truth teaches nothing else but its own existence ; it is for 
Man to rise up to that height where he may arrive at its under- 
standing. 

Jehoshua had now become strong ; he had become a 
prophet and Adept. Before his interior Illumination 
took place, he had not known that firm conviction which 
he possessed now. He had perceived the power of the 
spirit like a blind man, who feels the heat of the sun- 
shine without being able to see the light ; but now he 
had gained true knowledge, he had become acquainted 
with his Bride, Divine Wisdom ; and when during his 
sermons, being carried away by his aspirations for 
Truth, he rose into the regions of divine thought to 
embrace her, his human nature was lost to all conscious- 
ness of personal limited existence ; his Bride took form 
in him, and it was no more the man Jehoshua who spoke 
divinely inspired words ; but it was Divine Wisdom 
herself that spoke through his lips. His whole being 
appeared on such occasions to be permeated by the 
Light of the Logos ; yea, for all we know, it may have 
been the Logos itself manifesting through him. 

This may explain why, like the Avatars of old, he 



THE SERMON UPON THE MOUNT. \0J 

spoke of himself as being The Christ, The Truth, and 
The Son of God. This Spirit of Wisdom, that in an- 
cient times had spoken through the mouth of Krishna, 
| saying : " I am the way, the supporter, lord, witness, 
abode, and friend ; " * " I am the beginning, the middle 
and the end of all existing things," 2 repeated these 
words through the lips of Jehoshua, saying : " I am the 
way, the truth, and the life. 3 ... I am the Alpha and 
Omega; the beginning and the end" ; 4 and this divine 
spirit still continues to speak in the same manner in the 
heart of every one who is able to rise above the Sphere 
of Self and to become for the time being one with his 
God. 

He taught in many of the towns and villages of Gali- 
lee, and gained the hearts of the people by his great 
beauty and eloquence and by that power which always 
inspires those who are firmly convinced that they are 
teaching the truth. From village to village he went, 
preaching anew the old gospel of fraternal love ; and 
many times when the doors of the synagogues were 
closed against him, he may have been seen, standing 
upon a hill, surrounded by the listening crowd, while 
the evening breeze played with his long flowing locks, 
and above him on the distant sky shone that bright 
constellation of stars called the Southern Cross, as if it 
were to reveal the future that was waiting for him — a 
cross upon this Earth and eternal glory in Heaven. 

1 Bhagavad Gita, be. 13. 3 John xiv. 6. 

2 Ibid, x. 20. 4 Revelation i. 8. 



108 THE LIFE OF J EH SHU A. 

Those few and rare persons, the regenerated ones in 
the spirit, in whom the Word has become alive, and 
through whom Divine Wisdom manifests itself, require 
no preparation for their speeches, nor any elaborate 
arrangement for their ideas ; because it is not their own 
systems and opinions which they present to their audi- 
ences ; but it is the Truth itself, expressing itself 
through them. We are not now referring to those who 
speak in a trance, or as if controlled by a superior spirit, 
nor to those who talk of whatever enters their brain ; 
but to those who travel the road to Adeptship, who are 
able to hear the eternal Word in their hearts, speaking 
to them with no uncertain sound, and who give it exter- 
nal expression. Thus the bird requires no instructor to 
know what melody to sing, and in moments of joy or 
grief, when Nature pours forth her own sentiments, 
without hypocrisy and without restraint, thoughts rise 
from the heart to the lips and become words, as the 
waters of a well rise to the surface without preparation 
and without artifice — being doubly powerful from being 
produced by nature. 

His words coming as they did, — not from the brain, 
but from the heart, — went to the hearts of the hearers ; 
being in possession of the truth, " he taught as one hav- 
ing authority, and not as the scribes," 5 who repeat what 
they have learned in books, without being themselves 
convinced of the truth of their doctrines, nor inclined 
to follow the rules which they prescribe for others. 

6 Matthew vii. 29. 






THE SERMON UPON THE MOUNT. 



IO9 



Thus we find him one evening upon the Mount, in the 
midst of his followers, teaching them ancient truths 
in beautiful allegorical forms, which were understood 
by his hearers, because the truth was with them ; but 
which are not understood by our theologians, because 
the truth is not with them. Having departed from our 
modern civilization, having been driven away by cleri- 
calism, priestcraft, and external reasoning, crucified and 
killed by our modern " Pharisees and scribes," the truth 
has departed from our religious systems, and the alle- 
gories of the Bible are not understood, but accepted 
merely in their external literal meaning, thus degrading 
Divine Wisdom into mere rubbish. Let us invoke the 
spirit of Common Sense to enlighten our mind and to 
explain to us to a certain extent the esoteric meaning 
of a few of the doctrines taught by Jehoshua upon the 
Mount. We well know that many words will be re- 
quired to bring within the grasp of the intellect truths 
which can be imparted by a few allegories to the wise, 
and we also know that the explanations given below do 
not exclude other explanations equally true. 

Matthew, Chapter V. 

1. And seeing the multitude, he went up into a moun- 
tain, and when he was set, his disciples came unto 
him. 

Divine Wisdom being aware of a great multitude of intel- 
lectual powers in the mind, desiring knowledge, went with 



I IO THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

them into the mountain of Faith, and when tranquillity of the 
mind was established, the organs for intuition became opened. 

2. And he opened his mouth and taught them, say- 



Then the Spirit of Divine Wisdom came to the conscious- 
ness of the mind, and said : — 

3. " Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the 
kingdom of heaven." 

Happy are those, whose heads are not full of idle specula- 
tions, opinions, and theories, but who are able to receive the 
truth in its purity, as it comes from the source of all wisdom, 
being reflected in their minds, like the image of a ship sail- 
ing upon a tranquil lake is mirrored in the water. Happy are 
those who listen to the voice of their conscience and see by the 
light of their intuition without attempting to pervert by the 
sophistry of their external reasoning the truths which they in- 
tuitionally perceive. 

4. " Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be 
comforted." 

Blessed are those who do not seek for happiness in terres- 
trial illusions, but recognize the reality of the ideal world. 
Their mortal forms may suffer, but by rising mentally to a 
higher state of consciousness above personality and limitation, 
they will be comforted. 

5. " Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the 
Earth." 

Happy are those who have no personal desires, for they are 
already in possession of all things. What could be offered to 



THE SERMON UPON THE MOUNT. \\\ 

increase the happiness of one who is already perfectly happy 
and who has no ambition to gratify? 

6. " Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after 
righteousness, for they shall be filled." 

Blessed are they who love the truth for its own sake, for by 
their aspirations they will rise up to its understanding. 

7. "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain 
mercy." 

Those whose hearts are full of love and benevolence for all, 
will attract the love of all others. 

8. " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
God." 

Only in a pure and tranquil soul can the image of Divine 
Wisdom be reflected and be recognized by the mind without 
any distortions. 

9. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be 
called the children of God." 

The peacemakers in the mind of man are those spiritual 
elements which raise him above the sphere of limitation and 
personality and attract him to the Eternal. Being of a divine 
nature, they are properly called the children of God. 

10. "Blessed are they which are persecuted for right- 
eousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." 

Power grows by resistance. Those who overcome tempta- 
tions and remain true to their spiritual faith, even if they suffer 
for it, will become stronger in knowledge and in the happiness 
resulting therefrom. 



112 THE LIFE OF J EH O SHU A. 

1 1 and 1 2. " Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, 
and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil 
against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice and be ex- 
ceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven : 
for so persecuted they the prophets which were 
before you." 

Such an appeal to the vanity, selfishness, and ambition of 
men and to their hope for reward, asking them to rejoice over 
lies and over the ignorance of others, cannot be anything else 
but a pious interpolation, unless it refers to a certain occult 
process, during which the lower elemental powers in man 
become rebellious, when they feel the approach of the truth, 
and they then begin to revile him. 

13. "Ye are the Salt of the earth, but if the Salt have 
lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted ? It is 
thence good for nothing, but to be cast out and 
trodden under foot of man." 

The Will is the life of the soul ; but if the Will becomes 
evil and loses its sanctity, the whole constitution of man will 
become evil and useless for good. Evil desires will arise which 
must be " trodden under foot" and overcome by virtue. 

14. " Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set 
on the hill cannot be hid." 

The intelligent powers of men who have acquired wisdom, 
illumine the mind. Wisdom is self-evident to those who are 
wise, and even the inferior powers will recognize its beauty. 

15. "Neither do men light a candle and put it under a 
bushel, but on a candle-stick, and it giveth light to 
all that are in the house." 



THE SERMON UPON THE MOUNT. 1 13 

The Wisdom should not be overshadowed by selfish desires. 
When the mind rises up to the sphere of wisdom, all its powers 
will become illumined by it. 

16. " Let your light so shine before men, that they may 
see your good works and glorify your Father which 
is in heaven." 

Do not merely talk, but act according to wisdom, and all 
the intelligent powers within and without you will then recog- 
nize the wisdom from which your actions arise, and rejoice 
over it. 

17. "Think not that I am come to destroy^tn"e Law 
or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to 
fulfil." 



A knowledge of the truth cannot cause men to act against 
divine law, but it will enable them to obey it. It is the misun- 
derstanding and ignoring of the truth and the misinterpreta 
tion of the letter of the law, that causes men to disobey the 
law. 

18. "For verily I say unto you : Till heaven and earth 
pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from 
the law, till all be fulfilled." 

The divine law of Karma will exist as long as the world 
exists. It is unchangeable. Prayers without acts avail noth- 
ing, for no favors are granted. The true way to pray is to rise 
up to a higher condition and to become ennobled in character 
by acting according to the unwritten law. Miracles are impos- 
sibilities. If even the least deviation of the Law of Evolution 
from its course were to occur, its eternal and unchangeable 
character would be forever destroyed. 



Ii 4 



THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 






19. "Whosoever, therefore, shall break one of these 
least commandments, and shall teach men so, he 
shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven ; 
but whoever shall do and teach them, the same shall 
be called great in the kingdom of heaven." 

He who acts according to his own will and against the uni- 
versal Will of God, loses the consciousness of his divine 
state, and lives in that of his narrow self; but he who acts 
according to the universal Law rises to its level, and his con- 
sciousness expands beyond the limits of personality, partaking 
of the nature of the divine mind. 

20. " For I say unto you : that except your righteous- 
ness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes 
and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter the kingdom 
of heaven." 

If you act merely according to the dictates of your external 
reasoning, and not from a direct spiritual perception of the 
truth, you are then not in that state of spiritual consciousness 
which constitutes the divine state of man. No one will enter 
heaven by argumentation. 

21. "Ye have heard it was said by them of olden time : 
Thou shalt not kill, and whosoever shall kill shall 
be in danger of judgment." 

As long as men are not capable of rising up to a perception 
of the truth, they may desist from evil deeds merely on account 
of the evil consequences that are believed to follow. 

22. " But I say unto you : that whosoever is angry with 
his brother, shall be in danger of judgment." 






THE SERMON UPON THE MOUNT. 1 15 

But when you attain spiritual knowledge, you will know that 
it is your own state of mind and your thoughts, on which 
your future happiness depends ; for the inner life of man is his 
real life ; his external acts are merely the shadows of his 
thoughts. External acts produce effects upon the external 
plane ; but man's thoughts and his will determine the condition 
of his inner life, and produce lasting effects upon that plane 
where he will exist when he re-enters the subjective state. 

The above examples may be sufficient to show that 
the allegories of the Bible may be explained in a man- 
ner very different from that given by those who imagine 
that they are the Salt of the Earth and the Light of 
the World. 

The inherent power of the truths which Jehoshua 
taught, his noble appearance, natural dignity, and kind- 
ness of manner gained for him the hearts of the people. 
On account of the mixed population of Galilee, bigotry 
and othodoxy were less prevalent there than in Judea. 
There were many " heathen" who had no religious 
prejudices, and even among the Jews there were not a 
few who had honest doubts in regard to the orthodox 
creed. The coming of the Redeemer who was to be 
their king and to drive the foreigners out of the coun- 
try had been often heralded, and as often were they 
disappointed in their expectations. Jehoshua made no 
such claims. He wanted to improve the spiritual con- 
dition of the people ; an improvement of their external 
condition would then be the natural consequence. 
Many recognized in him a man of advanced ideas, and 



n6 



THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 






he gained many followers among the inhabitants of that 
country. 

There was, moreover, another circumstance which 
served to increase his popularity. It is well known to 
every Occultist that a certain degree of spiritual devel- 
opment is always accompanied by the development of 
certain occult powers, especially the power to heal dis- 
eases by the touch or by a mere exercise of the will, 
and also the power of reading intuitively the thoughts 
of others. Such things are not due to the action of 
any unnatural or supernatural cause ; for the power oi 
the Will and the principle of Life are said to be funda- 
mentally identical, and he who can control his own Will 
becomes thereby able to direct the currents of Life 
within his own organism, and to transfer them upon 
others for the purpose of giving health and strength to 
them. It is likewise believed that those who have ob- 
tained the power to control their own thoughts and to 
steady their minds, may thereby become able to read 
the thoughts of others, because the mental images cre- 
ated by the latter become reflected and mirrored in 
the minds of those whose souls are tranquil, and such 
images may enter their consciousness. 

Such powers Jehoshua possessed; he read the 
thoughts of the people, and knew their condition ; and 
many a case of illness that was considered incurable 
by ordinary means of treatment was cured by the 
power of his virtue. As his fame spread, many sick 
persons were brought to him ; he became a healer of 



THE SERMON UPON THE MOUNT. llj 

the body as well as of the mind ; he infused life in the 
bodies of his followers, and, dispelling the clouds of 
ignorance, he caused them to open their hearts to the 
influence of the divine light of the Truth. Thus he 
travelled through Galilee and Judea, and blessings 
followed in his path. 



I 



THE DOCTRINES OF THE 
CHRIST SPIRIT. 

There is only one absolute Truth. Being universal, it is seen 
alike by all who are able to perceive it. 

Ever since the most ancient times Divine Wisdom 
has taught the same doctrines through the mouths of the 
wise. Hermes Trismegistus, Confucius and Zoroaster, 
Buddha and Jehoshua, Plato and Socrates, Saint Mar- 
tin and Jacob Boehmen, Theophrastus Paracelsus and 
Cornelius Agrippa, Shakespeare and Shopenhauer, and 
innumerable others have taught the same truths more 
or less complete, and each of these teachers clothed 
them in a form most suitable to his own understanding 
or adapted to the comprehension of his disciples. 

For the sake of illustration, we will take a few ex- 
amples from ancient books that existed before the 
Christian era ; namely, the Bhagavad Gita, the books 
of Hermes Trismegistus, the Dhammapada of the Bud- 
dhists, and add corresponding verses of the Christian 
Bible, to show the similarity of these doctrines. 

I. i. " The wise man, ever devout, who worships the One, is the 
most excellent ; for I am dear above all things to the wise 
man, and he is dear to me." — Bhagavad Gita, VII. 17. 
2. " Embrace me with thy whole heart and mind, and what- 
soever thou wouldst learn, I will teach thee." — Hermes 
Trismegistus, II. 3. 



THE DOCTRINES OF THE CHRIST SPIRIT. 1 19 

3. "He who reflects and meditates receives ample joy." — 
Dhammapada . 

4. " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, 
with all thy mind, and with all thy soul." — Matthew, 
XXII. 37. 

II. 1. "I (Brahm) was never non-existent, nor thou, nor those 
rulers of men, nor shall any of us hereafter cease to be." — 
Bh. Gita, II. 12. 

2. "I am that Light, the Mind, thy God, who am before the 
moist nature that appeared out of darkness, and that 
bright lightful Word is the Son of God." — Hermes, II. 8. 

3. " He who has traversed this hazy and imperious world 
and its vanity, who is through and has reached the other 
shore, is thoughtful, guileless, free from doubts, free from 
attachment, and content, — him I call indeed a Brah- 
mana." — Dhainm. 

4. " Before Abraham was, I am." — John, VIII. 58. 

III. 1. "He that spread out this All can never perish. No one 

is able to cause the destruction of the Eternal." — Bh. 
Gita, II. 17. 

2. "What is God? Immutable and unalterable Good." — 
Hermes, I. 22. "God and the Father is Light and Life 
of which Man is made. If, therefore, thou learn and know 
thyself to be of the Life and Light, thou shalt again pass 
into the Life." — Hermes, II. 50. 

3. " He who takes refuge with the (eternal) Law is delivered 
from all pain." — Dhamm. 

4. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my Word 
(power) shall not pass away." — Luke, XXI. 33. 

IV, 1. "Asa man, having cast off his old garments, takes others 

that are new, so the embodied soul, having cast off the 
old bodies, enters into others that are new." — Bh. Gita, 
II. 22. 



120 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

2. "That which is unchangeable is eternal, that which is 
always made is always corrupted." — Hermes, II. 22, 23. 

3. "He who knoweth that this body is like froth and has 
learned that it is as unsubstantial as a mirage, will break 
the flower-pointed arrow of Mara and never see the king 
of death." — Dhamm. 

4. " That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which 
is born of the Spirit is Spirit." — John, III. 6. 

V. 1. "This embodied (soul) in the body of every one, oh son 

of Bharata ! is ever indestructible, wherefore thou oughtest 
not to mourn for any living thing." — Bh. Git a, II. 30. 

2. "Of the soul that part which is sensible is mortal, but 
that part which is governed by reason is immortal." — 
Hermes, I. 37. " Man is mortal because of his body, 
and immortal because of the substantial Man." — Hermes, 
II. 26. 

3. " Happy is the arising of the Awakened. Even the gods 
envy those who are awakened." — Dhamm. 

4. " I live, but not I, but Christ lived in me." — Gal. II. 20. 
" He that hath the Christ (in him) hath life, and he that 
hath not the Son of God hath no life." — 1 John, V. 22. 

VI. 1. "A flowery kind of language is spoken by the unwise, 

who pride themselves in Veda words (in false reason- 
ing and superficial logic), whose souls are full of lust, 
who regard (a sensual) heaven as the highest good. . . . 
The doctrines of these men, whose minds are carried 
away by mere words, are not formed for meditation." — 
Bh. Gita, II. 42. 
2. " Terrestrial things do profit nothing the things of heaven ; 
but celestial things profit all things upon the earth." — 
Hermes, I. 72. "To the foolish and evil, wicked and 
vicious, covetous, murderous, and profane, I am far off, 
giving place to the avenging demons." — Hermes, II. 56. 



THE DOCTRINES OF THE CHRIST SPIRIT. 121 

3. "Men driven by fear go to many a refuge, to mountains 
and forests, to groves and sacred trees, but that is not a 
safe refuge. . . . The thoughtless man, even if he can 
recite a long portion of the law (prayer), but is not a doer 
of it, has no part in the priesthood, but is like a cowherd, 
counting the cows of others." — Dhamm. 

4. "Not every one that saith, Lord, Lord, shall enter the 
kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my 
Father which is in heaven." — Matt. VII. 21. "This 
people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far 
from me." — Mark, VII. 6. 

VII. 1. "Neither intelligence nor self-possession belongs to the 
undevout man. There is no peace for him who is not self- 
possessed, and without peace how can there be happi- 
ness?"— Bh. Gita, II. 66. 

2. "He that through error of Love loveth the body, abideth 
wandering in darkness, sensible, suffering the things of 
death." — Hermes, II. 40. 

3. " Fools of little understanding have themselves for their 
greatest enemies, for they do deeds which must bear bitter 
fruits." — Dhamm. 

4. " Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom 
of God." — John, III. 13. 

VIII. 1. " Brahma is the oblation, Brahma is the sacrificial butter, 
Brahma is the fire, the burnt offering is by Brahma. Into 
Brahma will he enter who meditates on Brahma in his 
work." — Bh. Gita, IV. 62. 
2. "The like always takes to itself that which is like; but 
the unlike never agrees with the unlike." — Hermes, I. 84. 
" That which in thee seeth and heareth, the Word of the 
■ Lord and the Mind, the Father God, differ not from one 
another and the union of these is life." — Hermes, II. 19. 



122 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

3. "Without (spiritual) knowledge there is no meditation; 
without meditation there is no knowledge. He who has 
meditation and knowledge is near to Nirvana." — Dhamm. 

4. "He that abideth in me and I in him, the same bringeth 
forth much fruit, for without me ye can do nothing." — 
John, XV. 5. "Whoso eateth (aspires) my (spiritual) 
flesh (substance) and drinketh (absorbeth) my blood (my 
power) dwelleth in me and I in him." — yohn, VI. 56. 

IX. 1. "Let the Yogin constantly practise devotion, fixed in a 
secluded spot alone, having thought and self subdued . . . 
thinking on Me, intent on Me." — Bh. Gita, VI. 10. 

2. " Depart from that dark light, be partakers of immortality, 
and leave or forsake corruption." — Hermes, II. 78. " Why 
have you delivered yourselves over unto death, having 
power to partake of immortality?" "O ye people, men 
born and made of the earth, which have given yourselves 
up to drunkenness and sleep and to the ignorance of 
Good, be sober and cease your surfeit, whereunto you are 
allured and visited by brutish and unreasonable sleep." 
— Hermes, II. 75. 

3. "The disciples of Gautama are always well awake, and 
their thoughts day and night are always set on Buddha. 
Like a well-guarded fortress with defences within and 
without, so let a man guard himself. Not a moment 
should escape, for they who allow the right moment to 
pass suffer pain." — Dhamm. 

4. "When thou prayest (meditatest), enter into thy closet 
(thy soul), and when thou hast shut the door (of the ex- 
ternal senses), pray to the Father, which is in secret." — 
Math. VI. 6. "Watch and pray, that you may not enter 
into temptation." — Math. XXVI. 41. 

X. 1. "He who sees Me everywhere and everything in Me, him 
I forsake not, and he forsakes not Me." — Bh. Gita, VI. 30. 






THE DOCTRINES OF THE CHRIST SPIRIT. 1 23 

2. " Shining steadfastly upon and around the whole mind, it 
enlightened all the soul, and loosing it from the bodily 
senses and motions, it draweth it from the body and 
changed it wholly into the essence of God. For it is 
possible, o Son, to be deified while yet it lodgeth in the 
body of man, if it contemplate the beauty of Good." — 
Hermes, IV. 18. 

3. "Self is the lord of self; who else could be the Lord? 
With (the lower) self well subdued, a man finds a lord 
such as few can find." — Dhamm. 

4. " That they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and 
I in thee, that they also may be one in us." — John, 

XVII. 21. 

XL 1. "lam the source of all things ; the whole (universe) pro- 
ceed from Me. Thinking thus, the wise, who share my 
nature, worship Me." — Bh. Gita, X. 8. 

2. " The glory of all things, God, and that which is divine, 
and the divine Nature, the beginning of things that are." 
— Hermes, III. 1. 

3. "All that we are is the result of what we have thought; \ 
it is made up of our thoughts." — Dhamm. 

4. " All things were made by Him, and without Him was not 
anything made. In Him was {is) the life, and the life was 
(is) the light of men." — John, I. 3. 

XII. 1. "He who is the same to friend or foe . . . to whom 
pain and blame are equal ; who is silent, content with 
every fortune, steadfast in mind, and worships Me, that 
man is dear to Me." — Bh. Gita. 
2. "The strife of piety is to know God and to injure no 
Man, and in this way it becomes Mind. Such a soul, 
being pious and religious, is angelic and divine. After it 
is departed from the body, having striven for piety, it 
becomes the Mind or God." — Hermes, IV. 64. 



124 



THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 



3. " Let us live happily, not hating those who hate us ; let us 
dwell free from hatred among men who hate us. Let a 
man overcome anger by love, evil by good, the greedy by 
liberality, the liar by truth." — Dhanwt. 
4. " Love your enemies ; bless them that curse you, do good 
to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute 
you." — Math. V. 40. 

The above examples, if their esoteric meaning is com- 
pared, will be sufficient to show the great resemblance 
between the doctrines of the " New Testament " and 
those of the Eastern sages. But the circumstance that 
they refer to the same fundamental truths is by no 
means an indication that the writers have plagiarized 
each other. 

The truth exists ; it is as free as the air to all who 
are able to grasp it ; it can neither be invented nor 
monopolized by man. Men may grasp and remodel 
ideas, and express them in new forms ; but the truth is 
one and universal ; it may be seen and described in one 
part of this globe as well as in another ; it is eternal 
and does not change ; and the doctrines it teaches 
through the mouths of those whose minds are illu- 
mined by wisdom, a million of years hence, will be the 
same which it taught a million of years ago. These 
doctrines The Spirit of Christ still teaches to those who 
will listen to him ; for he is not dead, but lives as an 
immortal power whose name is Divine Wisdom, " The 
Word." 



HERODIAS. 

_. That which is said to have taken place in the history of the Jews 
is taking place to-day. Continually does Desire, to which Man is 
wedded, seek to alienate him from Reason, and by appealing to Pas- 
sion she often succeeds in his destruction. 

Gay was the throng which crowded the halls at the 
fortress of Makur, where the birthday of Herodes the 
Great was to be celebrated. Stately soldiers with glit- 
tering armors and helmets, beautiful ladies clad in rich 
garments and adorned with their most precious jewels, 
filled the rooms ; Nubian and Arabian servants were seen 
hastening through the corridors ; the walls were adorned 
with costly hangings and with an abundance of garlands 
and flowers, to prepare for the banquet, for a great orgy 
was to take place in that castle, to please the great 
king ; while in its subterranean dungeons languished 
the prophet John the Baptist. Let us throw a glance 
at the supposed history of those times. 

Herodes Antipas, the king of Judea, was an object of 
hate and fear to the Jews, who, in their turn, were to 
him an object of ridicule and contempt. Trusting in the 
power of the Roman army, by which he was supported, 
and in the favor of the Emperor, he laughed at the 
mutterings of the discontented people, as long as they 
did not disturb his comfort. Only when one or the 



126 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

other of those rebellious spirits, more daring or more 
ambitious than the rest, became too obnoxious to him, 
he nodded his head, and the noise-maker paid the 
penalty for his rashness by a slow death of starvation 
upon a cross or by the more merciful punishment of 
execution by the sword. 

He was a great profligate; but his profligacy would 
not have been an object of serious reprobation by the 
Jews, who were themselves an indolent and profligate 
people, if he had not continually offended their vanity 
by treating them and their religion with mockery and 
disdain ; but under the existing circumstances, his licen- 
tiousness formed one more welcome pretext for the dis- 
contented people to denounce him in private and to 
point at him scornfully and hatefully whenever it could 
be done without any risk to themselves. 

He was married to an Arabian princess, the daughter 
of a neighboring king. His wife was a beautiful, modest, 
and unpretending woman ; but having become satiated 
with her charms, he became subject to an animal pas- 
sion for Herodias, the daughter of his half-brother. 
This proud and ambitious woman accepted his proposals, 
and to remove the most important impediment in the 
way for the accomplishment of his incestuous design, 
the king made up his mind to murder his wife. The 
plan failed, because the queen, having discovered the 
plot through the information received by a faithful ser- 
vant, fled with a few trustworthy friends across the 
frontier to Arabia, to seek refuge in the house of her 



HERODIAS. 127 

parents. This incident and the circumstances connected 
with it created a great scandal all over the country ; but 
H erodes, infuriated at thus having the mask torn from 
his face, considered any further attempt at secrecy un- 
necessary, and resolved to defy public opinion. He 
therefore took Herodias to his court, and lived with her 
in open disregard of all decency and propriety. 
/Thus we often see that the great king of selfishness 
"in Man is more enamoured of some Vice generated by 
the reasoning intellect, the half-brother of Wisdom, 
than of his legitimate wife, Knowledge, the daughter of 
Intuition ; and when the latter sends her faithful servant, 
whose name is Conscience, to him, to reproach him for 
his infidelity, he attempts to kill her and drive her away 
from his heart. But when Conscience has once departed, 
Vice begins to show herself openly in defiance of all 
restraint. 

Among those who most denounced his immorality 
was John the Baptist. Fearless and uncompromising, 
his voice thundered like the roar of a lion through the 
desert, and its echo was heard at the palace of the Te- 
trarch. Death and destruction and a day of judgment 
were foretold by the prophet, and repentance enjoined. 
Tyranny, vanity, and cowardice always go hand in hand; 
and for a while Herodes became seriously frightened. 
Thinking that at all events it might be well to make an 
attempt to escape the penalty due for his sins, he sent 
to John to inquire by what means the angry God could 
be pacified. John, however, was inexorable. He replied 



128 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

that divine justice could not be bribed or bargained 
with. No prayer, no sacrifice, no ceremony, he said, 
would avail. He demanded cessation of the incestuous 
intercourse, a return to Knowledge, and a separation 
from the ambitious woman. 

Reproaches and accusations always smart when they 
are based upon truth. Such language Herodes was not 
accustomed to hear, nor would he submit to be made to 
appear to himself a villain. Still more angry was the 
beautiful Herodias, because she saw her plans for the 
future and her position threatened by the fanatical 
reformer. It required but little persuasion on her part 
to induce her lover to give the order for the arrest of 
John the Baptist, and to imprison him in the fortress of 
Makur. 

More than this Herodes was not willing to do. He 
did not want to kill Reason, but he wanted to silence its 
voice whenever it was unwelcome to him. In vain 
Herodias wept and represented to him that John deserved 
to be punished by death, and that she could not be con- 
tented as long as the prophet was permitted to live, 
because his very presence was a reproach to her. Her- 
odes knew that John, who was of a noble family, had 
many influential friends, and that to kill him would be 
to court an open rebellion ; but there was still another 
cause which prevented him from consenting to the re- 
quest of Herodias and to murder the prophet ; for he sus- 
pected that perhaps, after all, the prophecies foretold by 
John might come true ; and if so, what better means of 



HE ROD IAS. 



129 



protection against the ills that were to come, could he 
find than the prophet himself, who might act as his 
counsellor. 

Moreover, John, imprisoned in the subterranean dun- 
geons below the castle of Makur, was there as little 
capable of annoying the king, as if he had been already 
dead. There he might preach and denounce as much as 
he pleased; there was no one to listen to him. He 
therefore treated the requests of Herodias for the death- 
punishment of John the Baptist, as the results of a 
womanish whim, and he at last forbade her to mention 
this subject again. 

But who can baffle the designs of a woman whose van- 
ity has been offended ? Who can silence the voice of 
vice, if reason - is not permitted to speak ? Herodias 
knew the weak points in the character of Herodes, 
— his sensuality and love of pleasure, his lewdness 
and pride, — and she resolved to have recourse to a 
trick, to extort from him that which she no longer 
dared to ask. 

Herodias, as may well be imagined, was a beautiful 
woman. Stately was her form, and faultless her feat- 
ures. From her large dark eyes, overshadowed by long, 
drooping lashes, seemed to flash a supernatural fire, 
which made men her slaves, while a bewitching smile 
played around her lips, as if she were rejoicing over the 
victories she so easily gained over the senses of men. 
Her bearing was full of haughtiness and pride: thus 
must Judith have looked as she entered the tent of Hoi- 



130 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

ofernes to cut off the head of the king ; thus may have 
looked Messalina when she feasted upon Roman patrician 
blood. But while she might have been regarded as an 
incarnation of pride, and a personification of lust, she 
appeared nevertheless very modest. These lips which 
seemed to scorn the world, could flatter and plead, this 
graceful form could bow down at the approach of the 
royal voluptuary, and submit to the embraces of one 
whom she despised at heart. 

What did she care for H erodes ? His person was 
nothing to her but an instrument by which she hoped to 
attain that which she desired, — the crown. If he had not 
been a king, she would have spurned him and detested 
his touch ; but she well knew that the surest way for a 
woman to render a man her slave, is to appear to be sub- 
missive to him, and to obey his wishes even before they 
are uttered. Thus she ruled over Herodes, while Her- 
odes dreamed of ruling over her. 

She had committed a mistake by asking of him the 
life of John the Baptist ; she ought to have been more 
careful, and induced Herodes to offer that life to her 
spontaneously, and apparently without her request. 
This mistake had to be remedied ; for the head of John 
the Baptist had to fall, if she did not want to live in 
constant dread of his influence. " Who is this John," 
she said to herself, "that we should hesitate to put 
him to death? A beggar, like so many others that 
we have silenced when they became too noisy, and 
no one dared to reproach us for it. He, a worm, has 



HERODIAS. I31 

dared to crawl into my path, and to oppose my will. I 
will not recede ; I will crush him under my foot and go 
on : let his blood come upon himself." 

She had asked for a clandestine interview with Kai- 
pkas, the high-priest of the temple at Jerusalem, and 
one night he came to her in disguise. She asked him 
for his aid to annihilate John the Baptist, or to find 
a pretext to have the prophet accused and condemned 
by law as a heretic and infidel ; but while Kaiphas 
offered no serious objection to the imprisonment of the 
prophet, whose violent speeches were liable to produce a 
schism in the church and to lessen the authority of the 
clergy, he would not listen to any proposals in regard to 
his murder ; for John was of his caste, — even if he was a 
renegade, — and he harbored a certain amount of admira- 
tion for him. 

Thus the beautiful Herodias was left to her own 
resources. She once attempted to have recourse to 
some practices of sorcery, in which she had received 
instruction from an Egyptian woman; but her cere- 
monies were of little avail, because the powers of evil 
which she invoked could not affect the pure soul of 
John the Baptist : they reverted to her own bosom 
and filled her heart with despair. 

But if the powers of darkness were not able to do her 
bidding, there was a being, ever ready to comply with 
her wishes, namely, her own daughter Salome, the fruit 
of a former marriage of Herodias; a charming girl of 
about fifteen years, who was universally acknowledged 



132 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

to be the most beautiful young lady at the court of 
Herodes, and a most graceful dancer; and it had not 
escaped the attention of Herodias, that the eyes of 
the lascivious king often rested with a passionate glare 
upon the unripe charms of her daughter. 

One day Salome had found her mother in tears, and 
after begging her to confess the cause of her sorrow, 
Herodias took her daughter into her confidence and con- 
fided her secret to her. Then the two women concocted 
a plan which was to cost John the Baptist his life. Sa- 
lome was not a malicious girl ; but she was exceedingly 
frivolous, inconsiderate, and vain, and flattered herself 
she was able to accomplish a thing in which even her 
mother had failed to succeed, and to outwit the king. 
As to John the Baptist, she cared no more for him than 
if he had been a slave. 

In pursuance of the plot into which they had entered, 
Herodias made arrangements for a great festival to be 
held at Makur, to celebrate the birthday of the king. 
To that place the court resorted with a gathering of 
selected guests. Herodes was to be surprised by the 
magnificence of the feast. 

The banquet was opened in a large hall of the castle. 
On three sides of the room tables and couches were 
arranged in horse-shoe form, opening towards the 
entrance, which was hung with heavy curtains. In the 
midst of the half-circle upon a somewhat elevated plat- 
form there was a throne for the king and Herodias, 
while at both sides the courtiers and the ladies were 



HERODIAS. 133 

seated. Costly wines and rich viands were served, 
music and songs and various plays increased the hilar- 
ity of those present, but the best of all the perform- 
ances was to come off at midnight. 

At that time a number of selected beauties of Jerusa- 
lem, expert dancers, entered. They were dressed and 
ornamented in a manner calculated rather to expose 
their charms than to hide them. They performed an 
Arabian dance, that excited the senses of the half- 
drunken king to the utmost degree. But now in the 
midst of it the dancers made room, the heavy cur- 
tain opened, and Salome the beautiful whirled into 
the room, nude, excepting a transparent film-like tex- 
ture, thin as a spider's web, serving as an ornament 
during her dance. As the beauty of the moon, the 
queen of the night, surpasses the stars, so the beauty 
of Salome outshone the rest of the dancers, as 
she went through the most graceful gyrations. Her 
magnetic gaze was directed upon the king, as if 
he were the sole object of her desires and the 
rest of the assembly did not exist for her ; and when 
the dance ended and a storm of applause filled the 
room, she stood before the king, looking implor- 
ingly at him, her hands folded over her palpitating 
bosom. She was the personification of vanity and 
desire. 

" A kingly entertainment, indeed ! " stuttered the in- 
toxicated Tetrarch, who had not recovered from his sur- 
prise. 



134 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

" And worthy of a kingly reward ! " said Herodias, in a 
loud voice, so that all present could hear it. 

This remark excited the pride of Herodes. "Yes!" 
he said; "ask whatever thou desirest, and thou shalt 
receive it from me." 

"Then give me at once the head of John the Baptist, 
laid upon a golden plate," answered Salome. 

For a moment the king stared at her in terror and in 
surprise. He saw that he had been outwitted ; but he 
was too proud to retract his promise, and, as if ashamed 
of his hesitation, he answered with a forced laugh and 
sent one of the most stalwart servants immediately to 
execute the command. 

The above is an account of events supposed by many 
to have taken place in Palestine at the beginning of 
the Christian era, although there is no historical evidence 
for it ; but what every one may know by his own self- 
examination is, that in the kingdom of the soul of semi- 
animal man selfishness is the king, represented as Her- 
odes ; and the voice of reason, represented as John the 
Baptist, cries like a voice in the wilderness. In many 
cases man does not wish to listen to that voice, nor does 
he wish to destroy it, unless, reduced by Passion, the 
daughter of Desire, he complies with her request, de- 
stroys his own reason, and thereby himself. 



JERUSALEM. 



- The Truth is self-existent and independent of the opinions of 
men. It has not a stone upon which to rest its head, nor does it 
require any logical argument to support it. It is known to all who 
are willing to receive it when it enters their heart. 

A cry of indignation arose all over Judea when the 
foul murder of John the Baptist became known. The 
rich and the poor alike denounced, in unmeasured 
terms, that act of tyranny and cowardice. It seemed 
as if this had been the straw that broke the long- 
enduring camel's back, and in many parts of the country 
an open rebellion was threatened ; for John was not 
merely a general favorite with the people and the 
accepted prophet of the Nazarenes ; he was also of 
the Levitic caste, whose members were considered 
sacred. Now was the time for the long-expected Sav- 
iour to come. If he had appeared at that time and 
proved his authority by a few miracles, he would have 
had no end of admirers ; but the redeemer did not 
come. 

The Romans, full of security in their superior strength, 
remained quiet and looked upon the existing confusion 
as disinterested spectators. They knew that there was 
no hero among the Jews who could act as a leader, 
and the few persons who were inclined to act as such, 
counteracted each other's efforts by their own petty 



I36 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

envies and jealousies. The Jews claimed that some- 
thing must be done, but there was no one to do it ; they 
all waited for Jehovah to perform some miracle, but the 
miracle was not performed ; nor would an open rebellion 
without a great and heroic leader have been successful, 
for the Romans were well prepared for such an event ; 
and although they seemed to be inactive, they silently 
took measures to suppress an insurrection. They acted 
wisely in not irritating the excited populace, for soon 
the sensation caused by the murder ceased to be a 
novelty ; bread-and-butter affairs became again more 
important in their eyes than politics, and even the 
noisiest braggarts who had fought great battles with 
their tongues, quieted down. 

At the beginning of the excitement Jehoshua was 
travelling in Judea ; but when he heard of the murder of 
John the Baptist, he returned to his friends, the Naza- 
renes, to consult with them what measures were to be 
taken. He well knew that while the passions were rag- 
ing, it would be useless for him to preach the gospel of 
wisdom to a people whose reason was dead, and any 
attempt on his part to occupy the position of a leader 
would have immediately caused him to be suspected of 
being a political agitator. To occupy such a position 
was not his desire. It was not his intention to interfere 
with the political institutions of the country; but to 
raise humanity up to a higher region of thought, to 
bring them nearer to a realization of the nature of true 
manhood, and to elevate their character and their sense 



JERUSALEM. i^y 

of morality, upon which a change for the better in 
their external condition would follow as a natural con- 
sequence. 

All external conditions are the outcome of internal 
conditions. This is as true in regard to a people as it 
is true in regard to a man, a society, an animal, a plant, 
or a rock. We cannot change the nature of a tree by 
trimming its branches ; we cannot change the character 
of an animal by depriving it of its limbs ; we cannot 
change the character and the natural conditions of a 
people by forcing upon it conditions which are un- 
natural, because they are not the outcome of interior 
growth. The law of Karma is an universal law which 
acts within communities, yea, even within solar sys- 
tems, as it acts in regard to individuals. \A vice 
forcibly repressed, unless displaced by a virtue, will ac- 
cumulate strength until the pent-up force is followed by 
an explosion.) Man is whatever he makes himself by 
his thoughts. A people on the whole may be looked 
upon as a compound individual, made up of a great 
many personalities, and yet being one entity to which 
the same law applies. A vicious man would drop back 
into vice to-morrow, if his sins were forgiven to-day ; a 
people that cannot bear freedom would soon return to 
slavery, even if they were liberated by some miracle- 
worker. 

Individuals, as well as communities, grow spiritually 
in proportion as they rise up to a higher ideal. If their 
ideal is lowered, they sink ; if it becomes exalted, they 



138 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

will be elevated accordingly ; slavery is an unnatural 
condition for men, but a natural condition for slaves ; 
freedom is only made for the free. What will merely 
external reforms amount to, as long as the heart is not 
reformed ? Does a villain become less of a villain if we 
dress him in beautiful garments ? What will it serve to 
cut the branches of evil as long as the roots and the 
trunk remain ? Heroes are the product of the growth 
of ideas. Reformers come when the time for reform is 
ripe ; if they appear and bloom prematurely, they will 
produce no fruits. Luther and Napoleon were the prod- 
ucts of their times ; they did not create reforms before 
the necessity for reform had created them ; the charac- 
ters that appear upon the stage of life are the products 
of previously existing ideas ; external life is merely a 
shadow-picture, representing upon the wall of matter 
the picture contained within the magic lantern of the 
mind. Ideas are everything ; personalities, if compared 
with ideas, are nothing. Persons are only useful if they 
are instruments for the execution of ideas; a person I, 
who is not a vehicle for an idea is merely a corpse. 

Long-continued and abject fear of Jehovah had made 
the Jews a nation of cowards. They had no power to 
help themselves, because they excluded the saving 
grace of God from their hearts. They needed an ex- 
ternal saviour, an outward redeemer, one that would 
come riding upon the clouds, presenting credentials to 
secure an undisputed belief in his authority to save ; a 
god, invested with thunder and lightning to destroy 



JER USALEM. 1 39 

their oppressors. They were a people amongst whom 
individual selfishness had become so concentrated, that 
no true patriotism was to be found. There was at 
that time no Marctis Curtius among them, willing to 
sacrifice his personal self for the benefit of his country ; 
those who were called patriots, were inspired by the 
love of self and of vanity; they expected to receive 
some reward from almighty Jehovah. 

The more their self-confidence failed, the louder be- 
came their appeals to the god which they had created 
in their imagination. The odor arising from burning 
bodies of animals went uninterruptedly up to the 
clouds, to tickle the nostrils of the sleepy deity, to 
wake him up and induce him to fulfil his promises 
and to send the long-expected redeemer : but Jehovah 
would not awaken. 

Such times were propitious to increase the authority 
of the priest and to fill the money-bags of the church. 
Not to allow any profit to escape the clutches of the 
church, the temples were partly turned into stables and 
bazaars, where animals of various kinds, such as were 
used for sacrifice, were kept for sale. Cattle and sheep, 
goats and pigeons, were waiting for the priestly butcher 
knife, to have their throats cut after a bargain was made. 
Helpless beasts were killed to please the bloodthirsty 
god ; while those who killed them suffered ferocious 
monsters to grow up within their own souls. 

Those who speculate upon human vanity and greed, 
easily accomplish their purpose. At those times the 



140 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

ignorant believed that to obtain gifts from God, it 
was necessary to make gifts to the church ; then as now 
those who were able to pay for expensive ceremonies 
and church-service were considered the most pious and 
worthy to be respected. Well may the better-informed 
Pharisee then as now have laughed in his sleeve at the 
foolishness of the pilgrim who emptied his savings into 
the treasury of the church, to buy with material wealth 
things which could exist nowhere but in his own imag- 
ination ; but deception was considered to be unavoid- 
able and necessary, to secure a firm footing for the 
church in the hearts of the people and to keep them 
in subjection to the laws of order. 

Clad in long-flowing robes, upon which were em- 
broidered in gold, sentences from the sacred scrolls, 
the Pharisees went about public places, praying in loud 
voices and making a public display of their piety. No 
more did God speak in the hearts of men, for men had 
lost their power to hear ; but instead of the voice of 
God they heard the voice of the priests, who claimed 
to be the keepers of the truth. They said that their 
words were the words of God, and to prove their 
authority pointed to the books of the law and the 
prophets and explained them in a manner most suitable 
to the interests of the church. But the people believed 
what they were told, for their John the Baptist was 
dead, having been killed by their own Herodes, and 
could not enlighten them in regard to this matter. 

Owing to the ignorance and selfishness of the scribes, 



JERUSALEM, I4I 

external worship had become entirely divorced from the 
internal one, and empty forms and ceremonies were con- 
sidered of far more importance than knowledge. Re- 
ligion became a servant of clerical interests, and matters 
of theology became mixed up with political affairs. 

{All attempts to unite the interests of church and state 
will always degrade religion and weaken the state by 
creating a rival power within the latter.' True Religion 
has no other interest but the ennobling of the soul ; she 
is above all temporal and egoistic considerations; she 
does nothing for the purpose of gaining material wealth 
or to gratify personal ambition ; such things are done by 
the church, but not by religion. A government that 
needs the assistance of priestcraft to frighten the peo- 
ple into submission is a government of slaves, and itself 
a slave to the church. It is weak, and becomes still 
weaker by dividing its power with the Pharisees. Re- 
ligion ought never to be used as a means to accomplish 
an unreligious purpose ; true religion has for its pur- 
pose the final union of Man with the universal God, and 
rests upon a knowledge of the nature of the relations 
existing between God and Man ; but the foundation 
upon which priestcraft rests is the self-love of man and 
his desire to obtain rewards which he does not deserve. 
This selfishness is inherent in the animal nature of 
Man ; it is the rock upon which sectarianism rests, and 
it is as everlasting as the mountains ; for as long as men 
exist in semi-animal forms, their higher aspirations will 
be mixed with selfish desires. As long as they possess 



142 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

no knowledge of self, they will be helpless and ignorant ; 
as long as they cannot protect themselves against their 
own selves, they will look to the state for the protec- 
tion of their bodies, and to the church for the salvation 
of their souls. They may do away with certain forms of 
superstition and abolish some creed ; they may for a time 
imagine themselves to be free ; but as long as they are not 
free from their own selfish desires, they cannot be really 
free : for the devil who keeps them in chains is within 
their own selves ; he goes with them to the church and 
wherever they go. If they do away with one supersti- 
tion, it will be merely to replace it by another ; if they 
break the chains of one master, they will soon crave for 
another to protect them against their own selves. 

As long as men are not able to govern their own de- 
sires, as long as they possess merely opinions but not 
knowledge, they cannot be free, and require a master 
to lead them; but they have a right to demand that 
their master should know more than they know them- 
selves, and that he should assist them in gaining knowl- 
edge and not force them to remain ignorant. However 
much it may be in the interest of mankind to attain 
knowledge, it is not in the interests of their masters 
that they should attain it ; for if men were to attain 
knowledge, they would become free and need no other 
master but their own selves. Thus the interests of 
priestcraft are in continual conflict with religion, and 
will remain so until mankind comes a step nearer to 
God in spite of the resistance offered by the church. 






JERUSALEM. 1 43 

Woe to the church that speculates upon the ignorance 
of mankind ; it will be a power of evil and perish in dark- 
ness. Woe to the state that cannot stand without being 
propped up by the church. It may find the support 
pleasant and useful, but the time may come when the 
spirits that have been evoked grow strong and will not 
retire at our bidding, and they then become a curse to 
the country and overpower the state that called them 
to its aid. 

At the time of which we are writing, the alliance be- 
tween the state and the church at Jerusalem was not 
very strong; for the views of the Romans in regard to 
theology were different from those of the Jews. But 
the Roman government recognized the rights of the San- 
hedrin to have laws of its own, and it even lent its aid 
to enforce these laws ; and thus while the want of energy 
among the Jews, originating in their religious beliefs, 
made it easy for the Romans to keep the Jews in sub- 
jection, the recognition of the temporal authority of the 
church created — so to say — a Jewish government within 
the Roman government, weakening the latter and pro- 
ducing conflicts between the two, besides nourishing a 
rebellious spirit among the Jews, which had to be kept 
down by the overwhelming power of the Romans. 

Similar conditions may be found to exist even at this 
day in that " Jerusalem " known as the Mind of Man. 
In a well-governed Mind the king of Reason enlightened 
by Wisdom ought to rule supreme ; but if he forms an 
alliance with Selfishness, Reason will lose its power, 



144 



THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 






and a kingdom of Ignorance will be established within 
the kingdom of Reason. Then will the edicts of the 
" church" enter in conflict with the laws given by the 
legitimate ruler, and Reason will be lost unless Wisdom 
comes to its aid. 

Thus the processes that are continually going on 
within the Mind of individual men resemble the pro- 
cesses taking place within the Mind of Humanity; and 
as the thoughts of individual man find outward expres- 
sion in his features and in his acts, likewise the thoughts 
of Humanity find expression in personalities and histori- 
cal events; for/the visible world is nothing else but a\ 
stage upon which the inner life of humanity is enacted, 
a place where man's subjective and real existence finds \ 
an external representation in that sphere of illusions 
called the physical world. 



THE GREAT RENUNCIATION. 

We can attain the High only by rising above that which is low. 
The life of the God in Man necessitates the sacrifice of his attrac- 
tion to the animal elements existing in his constitution. 

Great was the joy with which the Nazarenes wel- 
comed him whom they now recognized as their Master. 
His mind had expanded, his spirituality had become 
strong, and his very presence seemed awe-inspiring and 
holy. There was no wavering or uncertainty in his 
decisions ; he had grown to that full stature in which 
man's thoughts become his words, and words become 
acts ; he had gained the power to control his own mind, 
and in doing so he controlled the minds of others. His 
superiority was so self-evident, that his former friends 
now became his disciples, and his followers looked upon 
him as if he were something more than mortal, — a god. 
Nor was such a belief unjustifiable ; for he had become 
so much united to his own divine inner Self, that the 
divinity of the latter seemed to permeate even his mor- 
tal frame and to attract to itself other spiritual influ- 
ences of the same kind, whose presence was manifested 
on several occasions. 

Thus once he went with some of his disciples upon 
the top of a high mountain, and as he stood there, he 
became deeply immersed in meditation, while his com- 



146 THE LIFE OF J EH SHU A. 

panions, not wishing to disturb the sacred silence, 
watched him from the distance. Then it appeared to 
them as if a light of a supernatural kind were emanating 
from him, and in that light they beheld the presence of 
two Adepts, whom they supposed to be Moses and Elias 
of old. 

Such an occurrence need not be regarded as impossi- 
ble or incredible by the sceptic. The Higher Self, the 
divine A donai, the " Spirit" of Man, is not a poetical 
fancy or a metaphysical hypothesis to those who have 
risen up to his sphere. There are perhaps few persons 
who have not at least once in their lives, perhaps during 
the days of their childhood, felt that such a " guardian 
spirit " was near, and there is abundant evidence in the 
biographies of heroes and saints, in ancient and modern 
history, going to show that man's Higher Self may 
manifest itself visibly to the lower self, and that it may 
have spiritual intercourse with its own equals, in the 
same sense as a mortal man may communicate with 
other mortals upon this earth. 

As to the nature of man's divine Self we are informed 
by the ancient Bhagavad Gita, that : " In this world 
there are two existences, the perishable and the imper- 
ishable. The Perishable consists of all living things, 
(the Senses, etc.) ; the Imperishable is called the Lord 
on high. But there is another, the highest existence, 
called the Supreme Spirit, who as the eternal Lord 
(Iswara) 1 pervades the three worlds and sustains them" ; 

1 The Logos (Christ), John x. 9. 



THE GREAT RENUNCIATION. 1 47 

and we are furthermore informed by the same source, 
that : " Some by meditation perceive the soul within 
themselves by themselves . . . , while others, who know 
it not, hear of it from others, and worship, and these too, 
devoted to the sacred doctrine, pass over death." 

These views are amply corroborated by the teachings 
of Jehoshua, who speaks of himself on many occasions, 
as if he had become one with that divine Self, while 
the apostle Paul and others repeat the same doctrine in 
regard to the corruptible and incorruptible body. 1 

Again he began to teach in the towns of Galilee and 
Judea, and more than ever his fame spread over the 
country and penetrated even within the walls of Jerusa- 
lem. The members of his family, who were astonished 
to see him acquire such a renown, went to him, to claim 
him as one of their own. But Jehoshua had outgrown 
that stage in which ties of blood form any attraction to 
man ; he had become one with his soul, and that soul 
was not the son of a mortal woman. He was a genius, 
and the Universal Spirit his Father ; he was above all 
terrestrial considerations, living entirely in the realm of 
the Ideal. Our parents are the progenitors of the phys- 
ical forms which man temporarily inhabits during his 
earthly life ; but that form is not the real self of the 
regenerated man, who existed from all eternity. 2 

Jehoshua therefore said : " Who is my mother, and 
who are my brethren ? He who does the will of our 

1 Colossians i. 27. II. Corinthians iv. 16. I. Corinthians xv. 53. 
2 John v. 26. 



148 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

eternal Father is my brother, my sister, and mother." 1 
He was so taken up and absorbed by the one grand 
idea of universal fraternal Love, that he lost sight of 
the earthly ties that bind personalities to each other. 
In his superior state he ceased to be an individual man 
in all but external form ; it was as if his soul had 
become unconscious of inhabiting a separate state of 
existence, and had mixed with the universal indivisible 
divine Spirit. 

How can such a superior state be realized by those 
who cling to the illusion of Self ? How can it be un- 
derstood by an age whose fundamental principle upon 
which its religion and science, politics and social in- 
tercourse are based, is the illusion of Self, and to 
which a renunciation of personal existence appears 
to be identical with annihilation ? And yet Chris- 
tians claim to believe such things in theory ; for the 
fundamental doctrine upon which original Christianity 
was founded is the sacrifice of personal existence, which 
leads to a resurrection in a life beyond personality and 
mortality. 

What is the signification of the Christian Cross ? Is 
it merely a memento of an historical event, to remind 
the present generation that some eighteen hundred 
years ago, an honest man was executed as a criminal by 
being nailed to a cross ? Then if that man or God had 
been executed by means of a gallows, a gallows would 
have become the emblem of the Christian faith, and 

1 Matthew xii. 50. 



THE GREAT RENUNCIATION. 149 

gallows in the place of crosses would now be seen in 
churches and houses and upon the tops of the spires of 
Christian places of worship. No ! The Cross has a 
far deeper signification ; it is a symbol that was known 
thousands of years before the advent of modern Chris- 
tianity ; it may be found in Indian cave-temples and 
upon relics dating from antediluvian times. It cannot 
mean the death of a god, for gods are immortal and 
cannot be killed ; it means the entire cessation of all 
thoughts of self — of all self-love, self-will ; it means the 
mystic death, the renunciation of everything belonging 
to personality and limitation, and the entering in a life 
in the Infinite, Unlimited, and Eternal. This renun- 
ciation of Self is the great " stone of contention " in 
the way of those who desire to become immortal while 
they yet cling to their personal self. 1 This superior 
state is one of spiritual consciousness above all sense of 
personality ; it is a happy, and therefore a " heavenly," 
state. It requires no keys of bishop or pope, nor any 
permission to be obtained by a clergyman, to enter its 
portals ; it merely requires the power and the ability to 
give up one's love for the lower self and to join the 
consciousness of the Higher Self, which already exists 
in "heaven." 

How could the prohibition of a priest or the maledic- 

/ tion of a pope ever prevent a man from rising up to a 

higher region of thought or entering a higher state of 

consciousness ? If man's soul is able to wing itself up to 

1 Matthew viii. 35. 



150 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

those celestial heights, no interdict will be able to pre- 
vent itN How could the permission of a church enable 
man to enter into a region of thought which he is not 
able to enter, because he clings with the grasp of de- 
spair to his lower perishing self? Verily a church 
claiming such a power is like the Pharisees of old, of 
whom Jehoshua said : " Woe to you, hypocrites ! who" 
devour the widows' houses, pretending to give spiritual 
gifts, while you do not possess them yourselves." * 

This doctrine of the entire renunciation of Self is 
the great mystery which the Spirit of Christ has taught 
at all times through the mouths of the sages ; it is the 
great secret which Jehoshua vainly attempted to bring 
to the understanding of a selfish nation ; it is the great 
truth which Divine Wisdom still continues to teach. 
Jehoshua' s disciples did not grasp this idea ; for when 
he explained to them that it was necessary to give up 
personal existence, to gain that life which is eternal, 
"they refused to go any further with him." They, too, 
dreamed of a sensual heaven ; their aspirations did not 
rise higher than to gain an everlasting terrestrial life in 
a material heaven, where, unburdened from gross mat- 
ter, their astral egos might enjoy a life resembling the 
one upon this planet, but without the sufferings of the 
latter ; a life where there are still personal likes and 
dislikes, attractions and desires, social intercourse and 
amusements ; a life in a limited, although ethereal form, 
full of change, and therefore not self-existent and not 
eternal. 

1 Matthew xxiii. 14. 

1 - 






THE GREAT RENUNCIATION. 15 I 

But Jehoshua spoke of a heavenly state, where no one 
is married nor given in marriage ; where there is no dis- 
tinction of sex or race or of religious opinion ; where 
each individual soul is a spiritual power, a note in the 
great symphony that constitutes the harmony of the 
All ; a state in which we will all be one in Divinity, as 
we are now one in Hitmanity ; an existence where all 
are cemented together by the universal principle of 
Love, where individual consciousness is swallowed up 
in the inconceivable happiness of eternal and universal 
existence, of which men cannot conceive intellectually 
as long as they cling to form, and which is therefore 
like nothing to them. 

A kingdom after this pattern Jehoshua wanted to 
establish even on this earth. He wanted to unite all 
mankind by the power of fraternal love, to do away with 
injustice, superstition, and priestcraft, to bring each indi- 
vidual up to a conscious realization of his own divine 
nature, to induce men to cultivate their spiritual talents 
and to develop the spiritual powers which slumber in 
every soul. He well knew that all men are not alike, and 
that there can be no external equality upon the mate- 
( rial plane as long as the process of evolution lasts. Per- 
' manent equality would mean a permanent cessation of 
progress ; it would be characterized by an absence of 
that necessary stimulus which causes activity ; but he 
knew that all men had the same natural rights for the 
attainment of knowledge, and that they all were entitled 
to see the truth and to strive after supreme and eternal 



152 THE LIFE OF J EH O SHU A. 

happiness. He wanted to give them a higher, a true 
Ideal, which would raise them up into the highest 
regions of thought to a nobler conception of Man, and 
thus by ennobling them save them even from their 
material degradation, by and through their own efforts. 
Great is the power of Wisdom ! It captivates even 
those who are not able to see it, provided they do not 
wilfully repel its light when it seeks to enter the heart. 
The soul feels the power of wisdom, even if the intellect 
cannot grasp it. The doctrines of Jehoshua captivated 
the minds of the people ; they began to look upon him 
as the promised saviour, who had come to destroy their 
enemies, to make the poor equals of the rich, and to 
supply all with comfort and happiness. Some believed 
him to be an incarnation of John the Baptist; others 
imagined they beheld in him the spiritual power of an 
Avatar. The Pharisees and the scribes of the temple 
at Jerusalem searched their sacred scrolls ; but they 
could find no prophecy of any star that was to arise 
from Nazareth ; they would not believe that any good 
could come out of that place. His language sounded 
insulting to them, because it exposed their failings ; 
his doctrines were undermining the foundation upon 
which their church and its dogmas rested. He deserved 
death, and it was necessary by all means to secure his 
person, to prevent further mischief to the interests of 
the church. In Galilee he was secure as long as he 
created no political trouble with the Romans; the au- 
thority of the temple of Jerusalem did not extend be- 



THE GREAT RENUNCIATION. 153 

yond certain limits. They consulted with each other 
about means to coax him to come to Jerusalem ; they 
tried to bribe his family to induce him to go there, and 
his brothers advised him to go. 1 

The idea of going to Jerusalem, to give the finishing 
stroke to his work, had already entered the mind of 
Jehoshua. He well knew the dangers connected with 
such an attempt ; but now he had grown strong and 
powerful and risen above all personal considerations. 
His personal safety seemed to him not worthy of a 
moment's thought ; it was the truth — not his per- 
son — that he desired to defend; and if his mortal body 
were to die in his attempt at defending the truth, the 
cause which he advocated could only gain by such a 
sacrifice. 

In vain his friends pleaded that he should not thus 
risk his life. Dark clouds of the future rose up before 
his clairvoyant vision ; but above these clouds he saw a 
light, as if a thousand suns were bursting forth in the 
sky, filling infinite space with its glory. He beheld his 
human personality like a hardly perceptible speck of 
dust in the boundless ocean of matter. Was it worth 
while to consider what became of such an insignificant 
thing, when the whole of humanity was to be saved 
from ignorance ? 

Let the would-be wise of the world call such a state of 
mind a product of a " morbid imagination," "hallucina- 
tion," or whatever they please. To the vulgar every- 

1 John vii. 3. 



I 54 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

thing is vulgar, and the worm crawling under the ground 
can realize nothing else but the presence of earth. To 
the coward, courage would be an abnormal state ; to the 
stingy, generosity is a pathological condition ; to the fool- 
ish, knowledge belongs to the unknowable ; to the self- 
ish, unselfishness is an absurdity. When our philoso- 
phers will be able to answer intelligently the ques- 
tion, What is Matter? then will it be time for them 
to study what is Consciousness or Spirit. When our 
anthropologists will have learned something more about 
the constitution of Man than merely his phenomenal 
aspect, when our naturalists will know more than the 
mere superficial laws of nature, and our "Divines" 
are divine in truth and not merely in name, then will it 
be time to argue the questions of eternity and immor- 
tality with them. Until that time arrives, " the wisdom 
of the worldly wise will be foolishness in the eyes of 
Divine Wisdom." 1 

In our utilitarian age the most useless things are 
looked upon as Real and Useful, and that which is of 
the highest use in the end is regarded as an Illusion. 
Matter is said to be all, and Spirit is said to be nothing. 
But of what use would Matter be without life and with- 
out thought ? how could we utilize Matter, if we had 
no Intellect to employ it, and what is the Intellect but 
an activity of matter produced by the stimulus coming 
from what is called " Spirit " or God? 

The time of the festival of the Tabernacles was ap- 

1 John vii. 3. 



THE GREAT RENUNCIATION. 155 

proaching, and this was considered by Jehoshua as the 
most appropriate time for his visit to the capital of 
Judea. At that time the city would be filled with great 
crowds from the country, upon whose good natural com- 
mon sense he might rely to a certain extent, because they 
were less sophisticated than the inhabitants of the city, 
whose opinions and sentiments change like the wind, 
where a hero may be glorified to-day and stoned to 
death to-morrow. 

The followers of Jehoshua saw that the storm was 
approaching. Some of the more timid ones began to 
regard him as a fanatic, whose rashness was about to 
bring on his destruction, and they silently retired to 
their homes. Others believed that the long-expected 
day of judgment was about to appear and that some 
great miracle was to take place. They went with him, 
because they hoped to get some celestial reward, and 
they already began to dispute which one of them would 
be the greatest in heaven. Many believed that he would 
never reach Jerusalem alive, that the priests would cause 
him to be murdered on the way, to avoid the sensation 
which was certain to be created by his open arrest. 
Perhaps on account of these considerations Jehoshua 
kept his plan secret and did not start for the capital 
with the usual caravan, but left soon afterwards by a 
different route, going by the way of Sichem and through 
the country of the Samaritans, known as the place 
where works of charity are performed. 

It is said that when he entered Jerusalem, he rode 



156 



n HE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 



upon an ass : nor could it have been otherwise ; for the 
truth cannot enter the soul of man unless sitting upon 
the ass of self-conceit, and those who attempt to enter 
the temple of knowledge carrying that ass on their 
backs will be left outside. 



THE TEMPLE. 

There is only one Temple in which the Truth can manifest its 
divinity ; it is that living and conscious organism which constitutes 
the soul and body of Man. 

The unexpected arrival of Jehoshua at Jerusalem was 
to the Pharisees of the temple like a thunderbolt com- 
ing from a clear sky. They had given up all hopes of 
drawing him into their net, and believed that he would 
not dare to come to Jerusalem, and now the bird arrived 
voluntarily and without any coaxing. But the bird was 
an eagle, and was likely to tear the meshes with his 
claws and punish his assailants with his beak. 

The first information they received of the arrival of 
their enemy came through the triumphal shouts of the 
multitude at the temple, to which Jehoshua had imme- 
diately gone and where he inspired his hearers with 
the living fire of truth that came from his heart. 

They went to the place where he spoke and they 
asked him by what authority he was teaching, and he 
answered them that he taught by the authority of that 
omnipotent power which inspired the ancient prophets ; 
but that only those who were true themselves would be 
able to perceive the truth speaking in him ; and when 
they asked him to prove that his doctrines were true, 
he said : " The doctrines which I teach are not my own, 



158 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

but it is the Truth which teaches them through me. 
He that teaches his own doctrines and theories speaketh 
of himself ; he is acting under the impulse of earthly 
ambition and seeketh his own glory and not the glory of 
God; but he that seeks to glorify, — not himself, — but 
God, by giving expression to the truth of which he is 
conscious, is true, and no evil can be in him. 1 Live so, 
that you may know the truth, not by external appear- 
ances and argumentation, but by its own inherent 
power. 2 Be true, and you will know the truth." 3 

"The organism of Man," he said, "resembles a 
kingdom ; its capital is the Mind, and its temple the 
soul. In that capital and temple there are many false 
prophets, as there are in Jerusalem. There are the 
Pharisees of sophistry and false logic, credulity, and 
scepticism; and the 'scribes' are the prejudices and 
erroneous opinions engrafted upon the memory. Do 
not listen to what these false prophets say, but listen to 
the voice of wisdom that speaks in your heart ; for 
verily I say unto you, the temple, built of speculations 
which the scribes have erected, will be destroyed, and 
not one of the dogmas and theories of which it has 
been constructed will remain, when the day of sound 
judgment appears. 4 

" See the truth enters your heart, bearing the palm 
leaf, the symbol of peace. Let it abide in you, and 
abide yourself in the truth. There is no other worship 

1 John vii. 16. 3 John viii. 47. 

2 John vii. 24. 4 Matthew xxiv. 2. 



THE TEMPLE. 1 59 

acceptable to the universal God, but to keep his com- 
mandments, which he reveals to you through the power 
of Divine Wisdom, whose voice speaks in your higher 
consciousness. Love one another ; and as you grow in 
unselfish love, so will you grow in wisdom. 

" Those who are seeking for Truth in external things 
will not find it, for the external world is merely a world 
of appearances, and not of absolute truth. The Spirit 
of God is pervading the universe, but the physical 
senses are not constituted to see it ; neither can the 
finite intellect comprehend the Infinite. Seek for di- 
vine wisdom within yourself; then will God come to 
reside in you, and you will find him. He that hates the 
truth hates God, for the Truth is divine and comes from 
God. If you let the spirit of Wisdom abide in your 
hearts, it will guide you into the light of knowledge ; 
but when it departs from your heart, then will you abide 
in the darkness of ignorance, and your soul will weep 
and lament, but the animal instincts within you will 
rejoice, for they love darkness and are sorely grieved 
by the light of the truth. 

" Open your hearts and see the image of the true God 
within them. He is not to be found in man-made tem- 
ples and churches ; and if any one tells you, Christ is in 
this church, or he is in that one, do not believe it, but 
seek for God within your own heart. Let not the Phar- 
isees and the scribes and the intellectual powers of 
your mind mislead you, but listen to the divine voice of 
Intuition, which speaks at the centre of your own soul." 



l6o THE LIFE OF J EH O SHU A. 

It may easily be imagined that such language exas- 
perated the Pharisees and the sceptics ; nor would it be 
tolerated by them to-day. They attempted to have 
Jehoshua arrested upon the spot, but they did not suc- 
ceed, because the populace took his part/There is an 
eternal battle going on in the mind of man and on the 
external plane between error and truth, between specu- 
lation and intuition, between true religion and priest- 
craft, and the two combatants are often so intermingled 
with each other, that it is exceedingly difficult to distin- 
guish them from each other and to tell where the truth 
ends and where falsehood begins. Every attack made 
upon the erroneous opinions and the selfishness of the 
church autocrats is misrepresented by the latter as an 
attack upon religion; not upon their religious views, 
but as an attack upon religion itself. Their church is their 
God, and the interests of the church are their religion ; 
it is all the God and the religion they know ; they can 
form no conception of a God without priestcraft, nor of 
a religion without church-benefits. Having all their 
lives kept their minds within the narrow grooves pre- 
scribed for them by their creeds, having become accus- 
tomed to worship an unnatural, limited, impossible, and 
helpless God, who needs the assistance of the clergy to 
teach mankind ; the universal, omnipotent, omnipresent 
Divinity, the Christ, whose light shines into the hearts 
of men is non-existent to them ; and although they preach 
such Christ with their mouths, repeating the sayings of 
the ancient books of wisdom, without understanding 



THE TEMPLE. l6l 

their meaning, nevertheless they deny him in practice 
and reject him on every occasion. They preach love 
and act hate ; they claim to love God, but the God they 
love is fashioned after their own fancies, and by loving 
him, they love nothing else but themselves. Their God 
is a limited, personal, circumscribed and narrow-minded 
God, and their love is equally narrow-minded and intol- 
erant. 

Such and similar truths Jehoshua attempted to bring 
to the understanding of the people in the temple of 
Jerusalem. " The spirit of Wisdom," he said, " that 
speaks in me and through my lips, and whose voice 
every one of you might hear within his heart, if he knew 
how to listen to it, is the way, the truth, and the life. It 
is the light of the world, and he that followeth it, shall 
not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. 1 
He who has become conscious of the existence of that 
light within his soul will not die, for he then lives in the 
light and the light lives in him. 2 I am not asking you 
to believe what Jehoshua says, but I ask you to seek 
for the truth within your own selves, so that you 
may know that the truth is speaking through me ; 3 for 
the truth is self-evident to those that are true, and re- 
quires no other certificate but its own self. 4 I am not 
here to do the will of the terrestrial elements composing 
that frame, but to do the will of the Supreme Intelli- 
gence, from whom all spirits are born. 5 You are now 

1 John viii. 12. 2 John vi. 57. 3 John v. 30. 

4 John v. 36. 6 John vi. 38. 



1 62 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

worshipping something of which you know nothing ; 
but the time will come when men will rise up to an 
understanding of that God who is not a product of 
the imagination of man, and must be worshipped in 
spirit and in truth. 1 Salvation must come from within 
yourself ; it does not come from without. It cannot be 
bought with sacrifices nor be conferred upon you by a 
clergyman, but it is attained by the sacrifice of yourself. 
If the spirit of God does not live within you, how can 
you expect to live ? 2 for the spirit of God is Life and is 
immortal in Man. The gods which men have created 
are the servants of their churches ; but the true God is 
greater than the church. There is no temple worthy to 
be the residence of the God of Humanity, but the living 
souls of those who are pure in their hearts. 3 There is 
no salvation without sanctification." 4 

Such unorthodox language was as intolerable to the 
Pharisees as it would be to their modern successors, 
if it were publicly repeated to-day. Such language, if 
tolerated, would overthrow the authority of the church 
and of that god who is believed to belong to the church. 
What would be the use for men to hire a priest to inter- 
cede with God, if God accepted no intercession ? What 
would become of the doctrine which taught that the 
Jews were the favorite people of Jehovah, if Jehovah 
had no favorites and was no respecter of persons, 
but a universal Spirit, dispensing life and light to all 

1 John iv. 22. 8 Luke xvii. 21. 

2 Romans viii. 8. 4 Hebrews xii. 14. 



THE TEMPLE. 1 63 

without partiality? "This man," they said, "must 
surely be possessed of a devil " ; and they consulted with 
each other how they might kill him ; but they dared 
not to attack him openly, because he was very popular, 
for there were many among the crowd who had been 
mentally blind all their life, and who now became able 
to open their eyes and to see the light of the truth. 

The people always admire courage and intrepidity ; 
they well knew the dangers by which Jehoshua was sur- 
rounded, and the fact that he remained within the walls 
of Jerusalem and continued to teach in the temple, in 
spite of the threatening danger, gained for him their 
hearts. 

There was an old law, which said that whoever at- 
tempted to create contempt for the prevailing methods 
of worship, or to cause disrespect in regard to the es- 
tablished forms of religion, should be stoned to death 
without the privilege of a hearing, without judgment, 
and without defence. According to this law, Jehoshua 
had many times incurred the penalty of death, but the 
Pharisees did not dare to arrest him, on account of his 
great popularity. 

But an event occurred which brought on the end. 

As the mind of man, the temple of the living God, 
becomes converted into a stable and trading shop, if 
selfishness is permitted to enter; likewise the temple 
of Jerusalem had become converted into a stable and 
market-hall by the selfishness of the Pharisees. The 
courts of the temple and even the interior halls were 



1 64 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

filled with stalls, where merchants sold their goods, and 
the noise made by the seller who praised his goods, and 
the buyer who attempted to cheapen the price, pene- 
trated into the innermost sanctuary. 

Grieved at this desecration, and while carried away 
by his ardor, he overthrew one of the stalls where trin- 
kets were sold, and his enthusiastic listeners followed his 
example. Immediately the selfish passions of the audi- 
ence were aroused ; their instincts told them that an 
opportunity had arrived for plunder, and a fight ensued, 
during which the merchants lost their goods and were 
driven from the temple, while thieves enriched them- 
selves with their stores. 

This unfortunate occurrence broke the spell by which 
Jehoshua ruled the hearts of the people. [ Brute force 
can never be an ally for the promulgation of the truth. ] 
Wisdom is a spiritual power, and external measures are 
useless for its purpose unless they are guided by wis- 
dom. For one moment only the great reformer had 
lost the mastery over himself, and now a crime had been 
committed. At that moment he had ceased to be a 
representative of the truth and become an offender — 
not merely against the laws of the church, but against 
the divine law of justice. As long as he contented him- 
self with denouncing the selfishness of the Pharisees, 
he merely appealed to the power of reason, but by his 
perhaps involuntary and unpremeditated act, he had 
appealed to the unreasoning instincts of the populace 
and entered into relation with the elements of evil. 



THE TEMPLE. 165 

By this act he had ceased to be a reformer, and become 
a disturber of the peace. 

The Pharisees were not slow to recognize the advan- 
tage they had gained by this event. They now appealed 
to the sense of justice and reason, and Jehoshua had 
to leave the city to avoid arrest. He went to the 
village of Ephraim and remained there with his dis- 
ciples. 

History is said to be always repeating itself. Even 
the Pharisees of the world and the reasoning powers 
in Man are willing to listen to the voice of the truth 
as long as it does not come in conflict with their selfish 
interests. All men admire the truth, as long as he 
remains in his cage and does not threaten their self- 
interest ; but when he overthrows a favorite creed, then 
will they drive him away from the city. Then will the 
spirit of Wisdom have to retire to some quiet place, 
to wait until the storm of the passion has ceased, when 
it may again attempt to enter the heart. 



THE HERO. 

That which is impermanent and illusive depends for its existence 
on external conditions. That which is real and permanent finds 
the necessary conditions within itself. 

It is not often that an error committed does not cause 
another. Jehoshua, in overthrowing the stall at the 
temple, had committed a mistake ; his flight from Jeru- 
salem was another one ; it was dictated by prudence 
and necessary to save his person from danger, but 
personal considerations of any kind should never be 
allowed to enter the mind of the true Adept, if they 
are in conflict with justice. He who has risen entirely 
above the sphere of selfishness, to that plane to which 
few are able to rise, acts only in accordance with justice, 
— a justice blind to all personal claims. Such justice 
demanded that he should have remained and faced the 
consequences of the act for which he was morally 
responsible. He well knew that if he were to deliver 
himself to his enemies, it was not justice but revenge 
that would await him ; but he perceived that it was 
wrong for him to have left Jerusalem, and that it would 
have been his duty to remain at his post. Moreover, 
the row at the temple had caused a misunderstanding 
in regard to the doctrines he taught, and it was neces- 
sary to correct this mistake. 



THE HERO. 167 

His first act of imprudence could not be remedied — 
the stolen goods would not be restored ; but to remedy 
the second mistake was in his power, and the fact that 
it was his duty to return to Jerusalem was strongly 
impressed upon his mind. In spite of the entreaties 
of his friends, he therefore resolved to return, and he 
selected for that purpose the approaching festival of 
the Passover. 

From a worldly and personal point of view such a 
resolution appears absurd ; but from the standpoint 
of the higher self it was reasonable, because it was 
right. His reason and logic told him that, while he 
would expose himself to a great danger if he returned 
to Jerusalem, he would probably not even find an oppor- 
tunity to explain his position ; but his intuition told 
him that by returning he would act in accordance with 
justice. The intellect argues and speculates to find out 
what may be true, but Wisdom knows the truth with- 
out any argumentation. His intellect told him not to 
expose his person to danger ; but intuition told him 
to go without fear : for even if the Pharisees would take 
undue advantage of him and act unjustly towards his 
person, that was their own affair, which he had not to 
consider ; for no man can be made responsible for any 
other acts than those which he performs himself or wil- 
fully causes others to perform. Logic came and told 
him that it would be far more reasonable for him to 
escape, for he would be able to do a great deal more 
good for humanity by continuing to live, than if he 



1 68 THE LIFE OF J EH O SHU A. 

were to go to the capital and permit himself to be killed 
by his enemies ; but Divine Wisdom bade him to go to 
Jerusalem, and to leave the consequences to God. 

The preparations for the Passover festival had begun ; 
the city became filled with strangers, and once more 
Jehoshua and his disciples were on their way to Jeru- 
salem. It was publicly known that the Sanhedrin had 
issued an order to have him arrested as soon as he 
should enter the gates of the city ; and when it became 
known at Jerusalem, that in spite of the threatening 
danger he was on his way to return, his friends rejoiced 
at his courage, and they went to the suburb to meet him. 
They received him with exclamations of joy and made 
him ride in their midst. Thus they entered the gates 
and baffled the vigilance of the priests, who did not 
dare to arrest him while he was surrounded by so many 
adherents. 

Thus does the soul of man rejoice when, after a period 
of darkness during which the truth had departed, and 
sin and selfishness assumed the rule, wisdom, the king 
and saviour, appears again at the gates. At such a 
solemn moment the passions flee to their dens, super- 
stitions retire to their corners. Peace accompanies the 
king and enters with him, and the whole interior world 
is filled with light and resounds with solemn harmo- 
nies, while from all the intelligent powers arises a glad 
Hosanna. 

But the priests and Pharisees well knew that their 
doom was approaching, unless they acted without fur- 



THE HERO. 169 

ther delay. If they permitted him to remain at Jerusa- 
lem, he would indeed become a king of the Jews ; for he 
gained all hearts, not so much by his arguments as by 
that power by which a superior spirit obtains the mas- 
tery over the masses. 

The arguments which Jehoshua used while teaching 
in the temple were indeed unanswerable and his doc- 
trines were «sublime ; but his ideas were too grand to be 
understood by the people ; they could not grasp them 
intellectually, but they intuitively knew that he was 
right, and they believed not merely in his words, but 
in Him. 

The Pharisees consulted with each other, and they 
agreed that it was not advisable to attempt to arrest 
him during that day ; they resolved to wait until the 
following night, and they bribed one of his followers 
to inform them about the place where Jehoshua was 
going to spend the night, so that they might secure 
his person without difficulty. 

Thus, if the truth has once entered the soul and the 
inhabitants of the mind have become conscious of his 
presence, all selfish desires will become subject to his 
supreme rule ; nor will it be possible for doubts to 
obtain mastery over the truth as long as the light of 
knowledge exists ; but when the night of ignorance 
again appears, and the intelligent spiritual powers 
which accompany the king fall asleep, then will doubts 
again appear, and by bribing Logic, one of the disciples 
of Wisdom, they will induce him to use his sophistry 



170 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

and to traduce his Master ; for this "Judas Ischarioth " 
is easily influenced by selfish desires and external 
illusions ; it can easily be made to traduce and pervert 
the truth : but if it allows itself to be thus employed, it 
would be better it had never been born ; for when the 
day of sound judgment appears and wisdom returns, 
then will this false logic be forced to destroy itself 
by its own power, and by its own deductions annihilate 
itself. 

The nearer this fallacious logic approaches the truth, 
the more dangerous will it become ; for an argument 
which is false and touches the truth, becomes a traitor 
to it. Only when Logic embraces the Truth and re- 
mains one with it, can it be trusted. 

The chief priests and the elders of the temple arrived ; 
and as they dared not capture him in the midst of the 
crowd, they attempted to mislead him with their argu- 
ments. They tempted him, and asked whether or not 
it was just that they should pay taxes to the Emperor, 
or whether they should give up their whole life to 
the contemplation of the things of the Spirit. And 
Jehoshua answered them in parables, teaching that as 
long as man is inhabiting a corporeal form, it is his 
duty to provide for that form ; but that he should not 
give to Matter that which belongs to the Spirit. He 
said that while the labor of the body and intellect may 
be employed for terrestrial purposes, they themselves, 
being of a terrestrial nature, man's higher intelligent 
powers and aspirations should always be directed to- 



THE HERO. 



171 



wards the Eternal. The body and Intellect of Man is 
his servant, and it is the duty of the Master to provide 
for the needs of the latter ; but the Master must not 
become the slave of his servant by making his wisdom 
subservient to the intellect or by employing his reason 
for the gratification of the animal self. 

Then spake Jehoshua to the multitude and to his dis- 
ciples, and said : " The Scribes and the Pharisees (the 
intellectual reasoning powers of man) have occupied the 
chair belonging to Divine Wisdom. If men speak wisely, 
observe what they say ; but very often they speak wise 
words and do not act wisely. The priests put heavy 
burdens upon the people, grievous to be borne, but they 
themselves will not — nor can they — lift a finger to 
move them. All the works they do, are done for the 
purpose of being seen and admired by men ; they orna- 
ment their clothing and make big arguments, and broad 
borders to their garments. They love the uppermost 
rooms at the feast, and the chief seats in the syna- 
gogues ; they want to be greeted in the markets and be 
called Rabbi, Rabbi ; but be not ye called Rabbi, for one 
is your Master, the Truth, and all ye are brethren. Call 
no man your (spiritual) father (by adopting his opinion) ; 
for one is your Father, the consciousness of the Truth. 
The Intellect seems now to you to be the greatest of 
the powers of man ; but it can only be the greatest, if 
it is illuminated by Wisdom. 

" Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, for ye shut up 
the kingdom of heaven against men, by preventing them 



1/2 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

from attaining spiritual knowledge. Ye neither go in 
yourselves, neither will ye suffer them that are entering 
to go in. You send your missionaries to encompass sea 
and land to make one proselyte ; and when he is made, 
ye make him twofold more the child of evil than your- 
self, because you teach him to argue and use sophistry, 
and to cling to external illusions. Woe unto you, who 
are blind to the spiritual perception of the truth, while 
you pretend to be the keepers of it, ye blind guides who 
strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. You are like 
whited sepulchres, which appear beautiful outward, but 
which are within full of dead men's bones and corrup- 
tion. Wisdom has departed from you, and will not 
return until you give up your hypocrisy and selfishness, 
and learn to worship the truth. 

" He who is filled with the spirit of wisdom, possess- 
ing spiritual knowledge, is the heaven-ordained priest, 
the true shepherd, and those who love the truth know 
his voice ; but the merely man-ordained and selfish 
priests, full of vanity and having no truth in their hearts, 
are like thieves that enter the sheepfold, not through 
the legitimate door of direct perception, but by climb- 
ing in through the window of argumentation." 

Such language was sufficient to wound the vanity of 
the Pharisees and their followers, and it was the more 
painful because it was true. Accusations or vilifications 
which are not just cause no pain to the self-conscious 
spirit ; they drop like blunt arrows from the armor of 
him who rises above them ; but the more an accusation 



THE HERO. 



173 



approaches the truth, the more will it penetrate to the 
heart and cause a painful wound. If the death of Je- 
hoshua had not been already resolved upon by the 
priesthood, this public exposition of their hypocrisy and 
untrustworthiness would have been sufficient to draw 
their venomous hate upon him : moreover, his death was 
now a matter of political necessity, for as long as the 
truth is permitted to remain, there is no security for 
priestcraft, sectarianism and erroneous opinions. 

He had aroused the spirit of inquiry among the intel- 
ligent powers ; he had dared to tear the masks from 
conceit and hypocrisy, and to hold up the nakedness of 
time-honored superstitions to public contempt, and he 
was hated and feared by the orthodox Jews. They 
desired to kill him, because Logic easily becomes the 
enemy of the truth if Selfishness whispers in his ear. 

As a matter of course, it was not to be supposed that 
the crowds which listened to his language understood 
his ideas ; for ideas, like trees, do not grow up and un- 
fold in one day like a product of Magic ; they require 
time to take root in the mind, to bring forth branches 
and leaves, to bear flowers and fruits ; but some seeds 
had been laid in the soil, and some persons commenced 
to think ; some of the intuitional powers within the 
mind had begun to wake up and become receptive. 
Some remained in that condition, while others went to 
sleep again, like a drunken man who opens his eyes as 
the thunder rolls in the sky, and then falls back again 
into his stupor. 



174 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

It may be asked : " Why should mankind be dis- 
turbed in their happy dreams ? Why should they be 
enlightened in regard to things which they do not care 
to know, being happy in their ignorance ? Is not the 
object of life the attainment of happiness, and how 
could we convey a greater happiness upon mankind, 
than by saving them the trouble of thinking, by taking 
the labor for their salvation upon our shoulders, so that 
they may spend all their time for pleasure and for the 
acquisition of luxury ? Is not the ideal golden age one 
in which all men are of one opinion, and what greater 
peace could we convey upon men than to cause them all 
to embrace one belief? If they would all believe as 
we do, they would be happy and bless us as their re- 
deemers." 

Such fallacious arguments, full of sophistry, are often 

» 

used by the followers of dogmatic theology. If all men 
could be supplied with an equal share of wisdom, they 
would all be equally happy ; but opinion is not knowl- 
edge, ignorance is not wisdom, animal comfort is not 
the object of life, knowledge of external things is not 
the aim of existence, a merely imaginary salvation does 
not convey immortality. If all men could be trans- 
formed into stones, all would cease to suffer; if they 
were all enclosed in one common tomb, they would all 
be equally at peace. 

The object of life is not life itself, but the attainment 
of a higher degree of perfection in the ladder of evolu- 
tion ; the attainment of a higher state of consciousness, 



THE HERO. 



175 



which can be reached only through that spiritual knowl- 
edge which ennobles the soulA What would a being 
transferred into the spiritual realm do, if it possessed 
merely a knowledge of externals, but no consciousness 
for spiritual things, and consequently no power to 
perceive its surroundings ? What would it do in the 
realm of Divine Wisdom, if it merely possessed the 
artificial light of Logic, but not the light of the living 
Christ ? Surrounded by darkness, it would exist within 
the hell created by its own imagination, until the laws 
of its being would permit it to come back again to this 
earth, to seek for light in a new expression in form. 

" Man has before him life and death ; whatever he 
chooses will be given to him." 1 If he chooses to re- 
main in darkness and ignorance, trusting that another 
will do his own work, his choice will be death in the 
spirit ; if he wants to live he must work ; for the truth, 
when it once enters the heart, will bring peace to the 
spirit ; but to the soul it will bring the sword with 
which to combat selfish desires and to conquer Self. 2 

It is not "Morals" that we attempt to preach, but the 
awakening of the inner man to a realization of his own 
true manhood. It is not a scheme of salvation by which 
divine justice may be cheated, or a certain rule of con- 
duct that we wish to establish, but the attainment of 
knowledge. The external conduct of a man, however 
good it may be, amounts to little as far as he himself is 
concerned, unless it is a true expression of the internal 

1 John iii. 13. 2 Sirach xv. 17. 



1^6 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

. state of his mind. ^Good conduct accompanied with evil 
| thoughts and desires is often a result of cowardice and 
• hypocrisy. \ 

As the evening approached, Jehoshua, with his dis- 
ciples, retired to the house of a friend, to partake of the 
supper that had been prepared for them. He spoke to 
them of the immortality of that divine and universal 
essence contained in every soul, and how all souls in 
which this principle would become self-conscious, would 
thereby be rendered consciously immortal. He spoke 
of that divine life of Intelligence that renders the soul 
which it permeates luminous, like a ray of sunlight per- 
vading a crystal globe, while the souls of those who 
were filled only with the love of self become dark, when 
the mortal intellect whose illusive light illuminated them 
during terrestrial life had become dissolved. 

"He who clings to his lower self," he said, "will die 
with the latter ; but he who, even during his life upon 
this earth, rises above all selfish thoughts, and becomes 
conscious of being an integral part of the divine Spirit 
that pervades all creation, will live. The soul of Man, 
having during his terrestrial life become united with God, 
when the physical body dies, returns with the spirit to 
the divine Centre to which it is attracted by the laws of 
its constitution, and will bring its own light with it, 
thereby increasing the light of that Centre. Thus it will 
glorify God, and an increased radiance of Light will take 
place and bless the hearts of mankind. 1 Partake ye all 

1 John xxiv. 17. 



, 



THE HERO. iyy 

of that Light which gives life, for it is the nourishment 
of the soul, it will form the substance of the celestial 
body ; a but the wine of spiritual love is the great fiery 
stimulus, that causes the souls of men to expand beyond 
the narrow spheres of self-adulation and personal exist- 
ence, so that they may become like gods. There is no 
• one to condemn you for your mistakes, unless you con- 
■ demn yourself. Those who are unable to see the truth, 
will not be punished for their ignorance ; but they will 
remain in darkness until they learn to open their eyes 
and to see the light ; but those who are conscious of 
the truth and reject it, prefer death to life, and they 
therefore commit spiritual suicide, that unpardonable 
sin, which causes their own destruction." 2 

They complained to him how difficult it was to keep 
the thoughts continually directed towards the Eternal 
and to exclude selfish desires, and he told them that in 
proportion as they would love all mankind they would 
forget their love of self, and that as their thoughts 
would reach up towards the Infinite, their own spheres 
of consciousness would expand beyond the region of 
selfish desires. Moreover, he taught them a prayer, 
which he had learned in Egypt from the book of 
" Kadish" and which they might repeat in silence, 
keeping their thoughts fastened to the sentiments 
therein, to prevent them from sinking into the lower 
region of minds. In its esoteric meaning it may be 
rendered as follows : — 

1 Matthew xxv. 26. 2 John xii. 47. 



i 7 8 



THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 



" Let us glorify the universal Spirit of Divine Wis- 
dom, from whose Light the consciousness of all beings 
originates ; let us worship Him by sacrificing to Him 
all thoughts of self and all individual self-interests, and 
by rising up to His sphere in our thoughts and aspira- 
tions. May no earthly wish ever cause us to act against 
the universal Will of the Supreme, who rules all things 
in the visible and invisible universe by His unchange- 
able Law ! May his power cause all mankind to grow 
in daily knowledge and to expand in Love, and may 
all men awaken to a realization of their true state 
as spiritual powers, temporarily connected with mortal 
forms ! Let no thoughts of our past deeds, when we 
were in a state of darkness, mar our present state of 
supreme happiness, and let us forget all the evils that 
have ever been inflicted upon us by others. Let us 
strive to become free from all the attractions of matter 
and sensuality, and submerging our consciousness into 
that of the Universal and Supreme, become redeemed 
from the illusion of self, the source of all evil ; for the 
mortal self of man is merely an unsubstantial shadow, 
while the Real and Substantial is the Indivisible, Eter- 
nal, and Infinite Spirit." 

While discussing such matters, the evening passed 
away and the sun sank down below the western horizon, 
when they arose to take a walk in the suburbs, to 
breathe the balmy air of spring and to pass the night 
in the garden of Gethsemane. 

As long as the soul of man is chained to its material 



THE HERO. iyg 

form, there will always be moments when that which is 
mortal in man attempts to assert its claims. The love 
of life is an inherent property of the animal element 
in nature, and the mortal parts in the constitution of 
Jehoshua seemed to feel the impending doom and re- 
volted. He therefore left his disciples and went a little 
higher up on the hill, to seek consolation from the 
Divinity in his soul and to gather courage and strength, 
and while he sunk his thoughts down to the utmost 
depths of his soul and seriously prayed to the Godhead 
within, he became lost to all his surroundings. Again 
that divine Light which at the time of his Initiation 
and upon the Mount of Transfiguration had filled his 
soul, illumined his mind, filling him with consolation 
and joy, so that he forgot that he was an isolated being 
and realized his Unity with the Eternal Father of All. 



THE FINAL INITIATION. 

The light of Divine Wisdom will not be seen in its purity until 
the clouds of matter that obscure the sight are dispersed ; the sanc- 
tuary of the temple cannot be seen until the curtain is lifted. 

The light of torches appeared in the distance, the 
clang of arms resounded through the garden of Geth- 
semane, and the guardians of the temple accompanied by 
a crowd of fanatical Jews approached the grove where 
Jehoshua was absorbed in deep meditation while his 
disciples slept. The approach of the soldiers called him 
roughly back from the realities of the Ideal to the illu- 
sions of Earth, and the disciples fled in dismay ; nor 
would the guard have permitted them to escape if they 
had remained ; still less would they have suffered them 
to offer any resistance. They knew Jehoshua very well, 
for they had seen him many times in the temple ; but 
the Truth they did not know face to face ; they only 
knew it from hearsay and from the revelations made by 
Logic, the traitor. 

They bound him and took him through the now 
almost deserted streets to the house of the High Priest, 
where he was kept a prisoner until the day began to 
dawn, and then they led him out of the city upon a hill 
and threw stones at him until he was dead, according to 
their law. 



THE FINAL INITIATION. l8l 

Thus the body of Jehoshua Ben-Pandira died ; and as 
his great soul left its earthly tenement, the latter grew 
dark, having been deserted by the light of the spirit, 
and its tombs opened to let the vital powers escape ; the 
veil of Matter, which during his terrestrial life had hid- 
den the sanctuary of the Temple of the Universal 
Spirit from the sight of his soul, was now rent asunder, 
and the genius of Jehoshua went rejoicing back to 
the bosom of his eternal Father, to receive his final 
Initiation into that Mystery which can be known 
only to those who have attained a state beyond all 
imaginable isolated existence, but which consists in 
becoming one with that which really is and in par- 
taking of its divine nature and universal self-conscious- 
ness. As his great Soul became resurrected from 
the grave of Matter, wherein it had been imprisoned 
during its terrestrial life, all the intellectual powers of 
his mind arose from their prisons and walked again in 
the bright daylight of Divine Wisdom. 

After he had expired, they nailed his body upon a 
wooden cross and left it there exposed, as a warning to 
all who might henceforth dare to defend the truth 
against superstition and scepticism, and the hate with 
which they regarded him has descended upon their 
successors, so that even now, when the latter refer to 
Jehoshua Ben-Pandira, they speak of him merely as the 
man whose name ought not to be uttered. 

His followers took the corpse down from the cross 
and buried it secretly, so that it should be no more dese- 



1 82 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

crated, for they looked upon their Master with great 
reverence and almost worshipped him as a god. In 
fact, the belief that the person of Jehoshua had actually 
been a god gained more and more credence among the 
ignorant, and there was especially one man, named 
Peter, who, having been an ignorant fisherman, had 
become one of the disciples of Jehoshua, whose teach- 
ings he could not comprehend, and who now began 
to teach this erroneous doctrine. He was seriously 
opposed by Paul, a man of superior understanding, 
who taught that the universal God could not be a 
mortal man ; but that He was eternal and omnipresent ; 
that "He is before all things and by Him all things 
exist " ; 1 and that the Christ is likewise an eternal, omni- 
present principle, the first born and greatest of all spir- 
itual Powers, constituting Himself the head of that 
universal spiritual Temple, wherein the Spirit of Divine 
Wisdom in his fulness dwells, and which not merely 
embraces all mankind, 2 but the whole of the Universe 
with all its inhabited worlds ; that " church " whose 
High Priest is the Truth, whose dogma is universal fra- 
ternal Love, and whose knowledge comes to all who 
open their hearts to receive it. 3 

But Peter, whose spiritual perception had never been 
opened like that of Paul, and who was, moreover, a vain 
and ambitious person, wanting to rule and to occupy 
himself, the place of Jehoshua, taught that men could 
not be saved by the attainment of Divine Wisdom, but 

1 Colossians i. 17. 2 Ibid. iii. II. 3 Ibid. i. 27. 



THE FINAL INITIATION. 1 83 

only through the authority of the church ; and as there 
are always more people willing to take the easy road 
and submit to be saved by somebody, than such as are 
willing to use strong efforts for themselves, the doc- 
trines of Peter found more adherents than those of Je- 
hoshua and Paul, and thus Peter, by teaching a doctrine 
contrary to that of Jehoshua, became a traitor to his 
Master and denied him thrice even before the cock had 
crowed to announce the dawn of a new day of enlighten- 
ment to mankind. Thus the darkness of ignorance was 
re-established upon the Earth, and the sacrifice of 
Jehoshua was, to a great extent rendered useless by 
those who claimed to be his successors. 

But the God that gave Jehoshua life and spoke 
through his lips is not dead. He still enters the heart 
without asking permission of the Pharisees and the 
Scribes. If his presence is once realized within the 
soul, then will man begin to know the King of the Jews, 
and bow down before Him. Then will the money- 
changers, the sophists, and scribes be driven away. 
The three Sages from the East, the principal powers of 
Man, his Will, Thought, and Action, guided by the star 
of Wisdom, will come and offer a continual sacrifice to 
the new-born God ; the soul of Man will become trans- 
formed from a stable into a temple, wherein Herodes, 
the king of selfishness, has no jurisdiction. The Christ 
growing strong within man will select those of his intel- 
lectual powers which are suitable to become His dis- 
ciples ; he will cure man's mental blindness, purify his 



1 84 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

mind of its leprosy, drive out the evil spirits of envy, 
malice, and lust from the soul, and make .the virtues 
which have died, alive again, even if they have already 
begun to acquire a bad odor. New powers will awaken 
within, but their development involves the crucifixion 
and death of all that is evil and selfish in Man. Then 
when selfishness has died and been buried, will the free 
spirit within resurrect from its tomb, and its glorified 
form will become visible to the eyes of the soul. 

Listen ! A well-known voice, which no one can mis- 
understand, is calling within your heart. It is the true 
Saviour, speaking now as he did when he spoke in the 
heart of Jehoshua : " I am the Way, the Truth, and the 
Life ; no one cometh unto the Father but by me." This 

I Christ has never died, but men have spiritually died 
when they became unconscious of his existence. He 
has been always with you, but you did not know it ; 
because your attention was attracted to your semi- 
animal self. He is your own God, the divine self of all 
men. He lives in that sphere where no separation and 
isolation exists ; but where all are as one. He requires 
no substitute to speak to your heart, no deputy to enter 
into communication with you, no " successor," for He is 
here Himself. He is yourself, and you will be He if 
you will merely open your eyes and become conscious 
of his Divinity within yourself by living in accordance 
with his divine Will. 
/ Not to depend upon the promises of another man, 

f even if they are said to emanate from a god ; but to 



THE FINAL INITIATION. 1 85 

exert your own efforts and to put your trust in that 
which is divine within yourself; to become conscious 
of the existence of God by rising up to the highest 
regions of thought and to remain therein ; this will be 
the religion of the future — the only religion worthy 
of an enlightened humanity. Then will the true faith 
be restored ; the Scribes and Pharisees, priestcraft, 
superstition and scepticism will disappear, and our 
works will correspond with our thoughts. Then will 
our knowledge not be based upon the opinion of any 
other man, but upon our own power to see and perceive 
the truth, and upon an understanding of the laws of 
Nature and the corresponding nature of Man. 

As long as men crucify the truth, and keep it hanging 
between superstition and doubt, the two thieves that 
steal the reason of man away, they will not be able to 
become self-conscious of its divinity. To obtain self- 
knowledge of the Truth, man must be one with it, and 
exalt it by exalting himself above the sphere of cre- 
dulity into the region of pure spiritual knowledge. 
Eternal Truth is immortal, and cannot be grasped by 
mortal man ; it can only be known to that principle 
which is immortal in man. The Truth can be known 
only to itself. 



THE CHURCH. 

Woe to him who pretends to be a co-operator of God without 
being a god. Let those who desire to reform the world begin by 
reforming themselves. 

Soon after the death of Jehoshua a spook is said to 
have appeared to Peter and his associates, and assuming 
the shape of Jehoshua, to have said to those present : 
" Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted to him; and 
whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained." Whether 
this self-evident falsehood, contrary to all the doctrines 
of Christ, was uttered by an Elemental, parading in the 
astral remnant of Jehoshua, or whether it was — like many 
other sayings contained in the Bible — a pious interpola- 
tion, made in the interest of the church, or whether it 
has an esoteric meaning, referring — not to the "apos- 
tles," but to the memory of Man ; — the acceptation of this 
doctrine completely neutralized all that Jehoshua ever 
taught ; it caused divine wisdom, justice, and truth to 
be henceforth regarded as matters of little importance ; 
it did away with the eternal God of the universe, and 
established in its place the rule of a man-made church. 

Absurd and monstrous as such a doctrine will neces- 
sarily appear to all who are able to use the power of 
enlightened reason with which they have been endowed 
by God, it was nevertheless greedily grasped by the igno- 



THE CHURCH. 1 87 

rant and by those who worshipped at the altar of Self ; 
for in the place of the invisible and intangible God 
of Humanity, whose presence can only be perceived 
spiritually by those who are pure in their hearts, and 
whose eternal laws cannot be changed by men, it fur- 
nished them with visible and tangible gods in human 
shapes, who could be bribed and bargained with; with 
a church that had the power to permit mankind to sin, 
and nevertheless to admit them to heaven after their 
death. 

The words spoken by Jehoshua, when he said : " Come 
unto me, all who are suffering sorrow, and I will give 
you peace. Follow me ; my yoke is easy and my bur- 
den is light," were now travestied by the rulers of the 
church, and misapplied by interpreting them in an ex- 
ternal sense, entirely opposed to that which Jehoshua 
intended to convey ; for he meant to say that those who 
would open their hearts to Divine Wisdom and follow 
the dictates of the Truth, would easily rise above the 
sufferings caused by the illusions of self; while the 
false prophets made it appear, as if those who would 
join their church and submit to their rules, would be 
saved from the labor which the acquisition of self-knowl- 
edge entails. In vain the apostle Paul denounced such 
an erroneous doctrine and said that he was preaching 
not a belief in a person, but a faith in the universal 
power of Christ} and that those who preached any other 
Christ but the Logos were teaching errors and belonged 

iGalatians i. 12, 16. 



1 88 



THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 



to the powers of darkness : his doctrine, like that of 
Jehoshua, was comprehended by few. He was de- 
nounced by Peter as being a visionary, and even his 
epistles were forged and falsified for the purpose of de- 
luding the seekers after the truth. 1 

Thus while the true and eternal, invisible and spiritual 
church of The Christ is based upon the Truth, the vis- 
ible sectarian " Christian" churches upon this globe 
are based upon a falsehood ; and while the former will 
exist eternally, the latter will exist as long as the powers 
of evil prevail. 

The doctrine of a personal extracosmic deity who can 
be bribed with sacrifices, was too much engrafted into 
the minds of the Jews to be easily eradicated by the 
teachings of Jehoshua and Paul ; and when soon after- 
wards great misfortunes befell that nation, they were still 
more in need of a saviour to accomplish a work which 
they were too indolent to accomplish themselves. Jeho- 
vah did not fulfil his promises, and the claims of the 
newly made Christian god were taken into consideration. 

"What shall we do to be saved?" asked the poor 
and oppressed ; and the glad response was, " Join the 
church of the Nazarenes ; and even if you fail to obtain 
any relief during terrestrial life, you will obtain untold 
pleasures in heaven." 

"But what must we do," they asked, "to obtain 
such a heaven?" — "Nothing at all," was the answer, 
"but allow yourself to be baptized with water and believe 

1 G. Massey, " Paul the Gnostic Opponent of Peter." 



THE CHURCH. 1 89 

that God will save you through the power of the church ; 
for he has resigned his authority and authorized the 
priests to bind or to loose : he has intrusted them with 
the keys to heaven and hell, and if you follow the dic- 
tates of those people whom God has appointed to rule 
in his place, you may believe yourself to be free of all 
danger." 

Such an advice was easy enough to follow. The sect 
of the Nazarenes grew ; and as the number of its agnos- 
tic members increased, its gnostic members disappeared 
from sight ; superstition took the place of knowledge, 
mere opinions the place of the true faith. The ancient 
doctrines of the sages contained in the books of Hermes, 
and the prophets which had heretofore been guarded 
with jealous care from the eyes of the ignorant, became 
the common property of those who were unable to 
understand their meaning ; they misinterpreted them in 
various ways, divisions of opinions took place, and sects 
arose like mushrooms after a rainy night, and the dese- 
cration of the sacred mysteries soon began to claim 
its penalty in rivers of blood. 

To the huts of the poor and into the palaces of the 
rich penetrated the gospel of joy and salvation made 
easy. The religious systems of the Romans were decay- 
ing rapidly, because they, too, had lost the keys of their 
mysteries, and the divine and intelligent powers pervad- 
ing the Universal Mind, which had been allegorically 
represented by their deities, had begun to be looked 
upon as being the personal gods and goddesses, whom 



190 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

their images represented. The people believed their 
own religious opinions to be threatened by the new sect, 
and persecutions began. These persecutions merely 
served to strengthen the Christians and to give rise to 
a heroism almost unparalleled in history. 

The arenas in Rome resounded with the cries of the 
martyrs ; Nubian tigers and African lions were fed with 
living men and women, and the bodies of the Christians, 
enveloped in combustible substances and set on fire, 
served as living torches for the orgies of an insane 
emperor ; but for every victim that died, hundreds of 
new converts joined the ranks. While the original gnos- 
tic Christians had attained eternal life by that mystic 
death, by which the lower self becomes as it were dead 
to all attractions of matter, while the spirit rises above 
the plane of self, the new converts, misunderstanding 
that doctrine, imagined to gain heaven by sacrificing 
their physical forms. To die " for the sake of Christ " 
and for the benefit of the church was considered a privi- 
lege, followed by an eternal reward, and thousands 
rushed voluntarily into the jaws of death ; thus imitat- 
ing the Indian religious fanatics, who, likewise in conse- 
quence of a similar misunderstanding, threw themselves 
down before the car of the Juggernath, to be crushed 
by its wheels, and to bargain away a short life upon this 
earth for an eternal enjoyment in heaven. 1 

1 The doctrine of the Hindus is, that he who succeeds in seeing the 
Dwarf hidden within the Car of the Juggernath, will attain eternal life. 
The " Dwarf " means the spiritual principle in the soul of man, and the 



THE CHURCH 



I 9 I 



The church grew, being continually watered by rivers 
of blood, and it became a power, rivalling the power of 
the governments. Kings and emperors watched its 
growth with jealous eyes; and as they saw that they 
could not suppress it, they asked : " What shall we do 
to make this power useful to us?" and the church re- 
plied : " Lend us the power of your arm, by which you 
enslave the bodies of men, and we will lend you the 
power by which we enslave their minds." They ac- 
cepted the offer, and made the pact with the church, 
and the Evil One, whose offer Jehoshua had rejected 
while in the wilderness, signed the contract, putting the 
name of " Christ " to the document. 

The Christians ceased to be persecuted, and the 
church now became a persecutor in the name of Christ, 
being assisted in her work by the powers of the state. 
Europe was at that time overrun with idlers and vaga- 
bonds, and the " Holy Land " in the East, which they 
could not find in their souls, looked inviting for pil- 
lage and plunder. Religious fanatics inflamed the 
populace, and soon Europe emptied its dregs upon the 
"heathen," and murder and rape were committed in 

" Car " is the body, and it is perfectly true that those who learn to know 
the Divinity in their souls, while living in the body, thereby attain spiritual 
consciousness. But the ignorant, misunderstanding this doctrine, applied 
it in a literal sense. They had a wagon constructed, and called it the 
Juggernath, and as it was drawn through the streets, they crowded around 
it, to see a dwarf, whom they believed to be hidden therein. Many were 
crushed by the wheels in their vain attempts to see that dwarf, and as such 
a death was said to be meritorious, and to open the portals of heaven, it 
became gradually fashionable to commit suicide in this manner. 



I92 THE LIFE OF J EH SHU A. 

the name of Him who taught the religion of universal 
fraternal love to humanity. 

The God of the Christian church was as impotent as 
that of the Jews. He had no power to save his wor- 
shippers from the fate they deserved ; but as he grew 
in size he increased the fanaticism and the greed of his 
priests. The " holy inquisition " was inaugurated, and 
fagots kindled by well-fed monks depopulated the coun- 
try and filled the treasury of the church. Millions of 
human beings expired upon the rack or stake, in dun- 
geons or upon the battle-field, and the most horrible 
crimes were committed by the God of the church that 
paraded in the mask of Christ. 

At last a reaction began, for the age had become 
ripe for a change. The spirit of Luther overthrew 
the monster at Rome ; but while he succeeded to a 
certain extent in driving back the powers of darkness 
that ruled the country, he could not remove the clouds 
that prevent mankind from seeing the light. By the 
side of the gloomy cathedrals of Rome, he erected 
churches, whose windows admitted more light ; but 
when he entered therein, an army of devils followed him. 
His temples are built upon the same foundation as that 
of the church of Rome ; namely, upon a belief in salva- 
tion by external means of that perishing thing called 
the personal self. Both churches, with all their sub- 
divisions, are based upon the selfish propensities in- 
herent in the semi-animal nature in man ; both appeal 
to his selfish desire for reward and to his fear of 



THE CHURCH. 1 93 

punishment in the problematical hereafter. Both 
are resting upon the erroneous belief that Divine 
authority can be conferred upon man-ordained priests by 
a man-made church ; but while the Roman church — if 
once the fundamental falsehood upon which she bases 
her claims is accepted — may appeal to Logic, the 
most powerful devil in man, to prove her other preten- 
sions, the claims of the Protestant church for Divine 
authority to save mankind are not so supported. 

What is that thing which these people desire to save, 
whose existence they desire to preserve, whose life they 
crave to prolong ? What is this personal self ? It has 
no self-existence and possesses no life of its own. It is 
a continually changing conglomeration of principles, 
endowed with a continually changing consciousness. 
If it were not for the power of memory, which connects 
these continually changing states of mind with each 
other, and which is itself subject to change, no man 
would ever know that he is the same person he was 
an hour ago. The only thing in man which is not 
subject to change is his consciousness of the Eter- 
nal, and whenever he enters that state, he forgets 
that he is a person, becomes unconscious of the iso- 
lation of form, and is only conscious of being in the 
Infinite Spirit. These are facts, which require no argu- 
ments for proof, but which every one may know by 
reflection and self-examination : they are self-evident. 
But this consciousness of the eternal needs no salvation ; 
it is already safe, for it is the consciousness of the 



194 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

Christ ; the only state in which man can be immortal, 
because it is not subject to change. | Salvation is there- 
fore an internal process which no man can produce 
! for another, but which each one must accomplish within 
himself. \ To enter that state of consciousness in the 
Eternal is the only possible salvation for man. 

As long as men possess no self-knowledge, they will 
clamor for a belief ; as long as they possess insufficient 
self-control, they will crave to be the slaves of a master ; 
and priestcraft, assuming the garb of Religion, takes her 
harp and sings the sweet lullaby : — 

" Come to me, all of ye who are troubled with sor- 
row ; I will take the load from your shoulders. I will 
save you the trouble of thinking and of mastering your 
passions. I will make the battle for self-control easy for 
you by thinking for you and assuming control over you. 
I will take care of your thoughts while you live ; I will 
give you bladders to swim and crutches to walk with, 
and you will rest warm on my maternal bosom. I will 
lull you to sleep when you die, and take care of you 
after your death." 

Thus the siren song is heard, while the ship glides 
along upon the storm-tossed waves of the river of life, 
and the helmsman listens, and dropping the oar he falls 
in a drowsy sleep and indulges in fanciful dreams, trust- 
ing the guidance of the ship to a form without sub- 
stance or power, until it founders upon the rocks. 

Great is the imaginary power by which men are de- 
Aided, and which is called the authority of the church. 



THE CHURCH. 1 95 

It has become a dangerous rival of the governments, 
and the day may arrive when the latter will curse the 
day when they signed the compact. 

The unreality of the pretensions of the modern 
church has come to the understanding of the more 
enlightened masses. They have begun to laugh at her 
claims, but the church laughs at them. She clings for 
protection to the skirts of the goddess of fashion ; the 
goddess gives her bright ornaments of brass and glitter- 
ing tinsel ; she furnishes her with pomp and elaborate 
ceremonies, and men are used to imagine that they are 
in need of these things : they borrow them from the 
church, and the latter again takes hold of the leading- 
strings. 

And while this farce is played, the true church of the 
Christ is deserted. Clear and strong shines the bright 
sunshine of Divine Wisdom through the transparent 
roof of its dome, as it did in ancient times ; but the 
crowds of worshippers that used to crowd the halls 
have deserted the temple. The sacrificial fires upon 
the altars have gone out for want of fuel ; for those who 
used to worship in the temple of Wisdom now worship 
at the altar of Self. The temple of Truth, wherein all 
humanity unknowingly live and whose altars exist in 
the innermost centre of every human heart, is the tem- 
ple, where the divine Redeemer still continues to teach, 
in spite of all the Pharisees and scribes by which he 
is now surrounded. External churches decay, unless 
they are upheld and supported by man ; but this eter- 



I96 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

nal temple needs no support from mortals : it will never 
cease to exist. It asks for no favors and fees ; but the 
condition to be admitted to it is an entire renunciation 
of self. It requires no one to explain its doctrines, for 
the truth becomes clear to all as soon as they become 
able to see it, and all will recognize it by its beauty as 
soon as they draw the veil from its face. The founda- 
tion of that temple is knowledge, — not that illusive 
knowledge taught by mortal man, which refers merely 
to the illusions of sense, but that spiritual knowledge 
which arises from a realization of the truth. Fear and 
doubt do not enter that temple, nor is there any differ- 
ence of opinion ; because the truth is only one in the 
absolute, and all who know it have the same knowledge. 
I There are no inducements held out in that temple to 
cause men to be virtuous but the beauty of virtue; 
there is no other penalty for the wicked but that which 
naturally follows the disobedience of the law. There is 
only one supreme Law, the Love of absolute Good. 
When men become satiated with the worship of self 
and of living on salt sea fruit, they will again return 
to the Temple of Wisdom to partake of the water of 
Truth. 



CONCLUSION. 

There can be no higher wisdom than a realization of Divine 
Truth. 

In the preceding pages we have attempted to draw 
a picture of Jehoshua Ben-Pandira, in whom the eternal 
Christ became manifest, for the purpose of bringing 
the mind nearer to an intellectual understanding of the 
real nature of Man, and the soul nearer to a realization 
of the presence of the real, living, eternal, and only 
true Christ, the Spirit of Divine Wisdom, that may 
become manifest in all who are receptive for it. 

Many of the doctrines we have attempted to explain 
are not new. They are taught in Christian pulpits, 
and moreover they are also taught — but in different 
forms — in the pulpits of those whom the Christians are 
pleased to call the " heathen." It will therefore be 
readily seen by the unprejudiced observer, that — while 
denouncing the abuses made of religion by priestcraft 
— neither Jehoshua nor ourselves have been attempt- 
ing to overthrow the truth of Christianity, nor of any 
other religious system. We have attempted to show 
that, while the Christ whom the Christian sects are 
preaching is merely a human being, whose work of 
redemption is a thing of the past, the Christ taught 
by the spiritual perception of Man is an eternal, ever- 



I98 THE LIFE OF J EH SHU A. 

present, infinite Power, whose work of redemption is 
still and continually going on within the hearts of all 
who worship the truth. 

It may be left to those who are able to think, to 
decide for themselves, whether or not a belief in the 
existence of an historical personal Christ is compatible 
with their own intuition and necessary, sufficient, or 
useful for their salvation ; but whether such a belief 
is justified by facts, or merely insisted upon as a neces- 
sity for those who are not yet able to grasp the deeper 
mysteries of religion, it seems self-evident that if such 
an historical belief is made the main pillar of the Chris- 
tian faith, and if Christians are satisfied with such an 
external belief, they will not gain any real knowledge 
of the truth ; for he who rests satisfied with an adopted 
creed or opinion will seek no further, and remaining 
idle, his progress will come to a stop. 

We have attempted to show that the events so beau- 
tifully described in the Bible are allegories, representing 
occurrences which have not only taken place in the 
past, but which are continually taking place within the 
psychic organization of man, and which will continue to 
occur in the future ; for God, Nature, and Man are one 
undivided whole ; the processes going on within the 
Universal Mind are continually mirrored forth within 
the mind of man, and the internally acting powers 
of Universal Nature find their expression in external 
forms, as the thoughts of man find their external expres- 
sion in his physical form and in his external actions. 



CONCLUSION. I99 

Whether a belief in an " historical " Christ walking 
upon the earth in the shape of a man is justifiable or 
not, it can only be useful to induce mankind to look up 
to him as an ideal whose example they may imitate. 
To enable us to live up to a high ideal, it is not neces- 
sary that the latter should have been incorporated in a 
gross material form : it is far more necessary that our 
ideal should take form within ourselves. 

It is one of the fundamental doctrines of occult 
science, that man is the product of his own thoughts ; 
he is that which he makes himself by the way he 
thinks and acts, for his external form is nothing else 
but an outward symbol of his internal character, modi- 
fied by the want of plasticity of the gross matter com- 
posing his body, for gross matter is not sufficiently 
plastic to change in form as rapidly as his thoughts. 
The matter composing the soul is more plastic. If our 
thoughts are continually low and vulgar, it will become 
correspondingly degraded ; but if we are continually 
thinking of a high Ideal, our Ideal will take form within 
ourselves. If we are satisfied with a belief in an histor- 
ical Christ without seeking to cause or enable a Christ 
to grow within ourselves, such a belief will not be 
merely useless, but it will be an impediment in our 
way to perfection. 

The object of true religion is to ennoble mankind 
and to awaken men to a realization of the divinity of 
the Spirit within themselves. Religion in its theoretical 
aspect means a real knowledge of the relations which 



200 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

exist between man and the eternal Source from which 
his Spirit emanated in the beginning; religion in its 
practical aspect means the union of man with God, — 
a union that cannot be effected through the external 
interference or permission of a clergyman, but which 
must be effected by the power of the internal Will. 
There is no real knowledge to be attained by merely 
learning a theory ; there is no real knowledge unless 
the theory is confirmed by practice. 

We would not abolish the external forms of religious 
worship, because forms are necessary for those who live 
in a form to lead them up to higher conceptions of the 
truth by means of an idealization of forms, until they 
arrive at a state in which they may realize the existence 
of that which is above form and above expression in 
language ; but if the practice of a religion is not at all 
in accordance with its theory ; if the form is made to 
assume the prerogatives of the living spirit ; if a knowl- 
edge of the truth is made to rest upon a belief in an 
improbable tale of an external historical event, while 
the truth itself is denied admittance ; if religion, instead 
of being used to ennoble mankind, is made to serve the 
temporal purposes of the churches ; then will the living 
spirit depart from the forms, and the forms themselves 
will decay. 

Such a decay is almost universally observed. Even 
those who cling to the church must be aware of the 
fact that in visiting the churches they receive nothing | 
but what they bring with them to the church, and that I 



CONCLUSION. 20 1 

I a sermon is only effective upon the audience if it gives 
expression to the sentiments of the latter; but the 
masses of the people are beginning to look upon the 
promises made by the churches as being drafts upon 
a bank which does not exist, and upon the "places of 
worship " as serving rather for houses of fashionable 
resort and religious amusement, than as places where 
anything useful is taught. They instinctively feel that 
there can be no salvation by merely external means, 
and having been misled by the superficial arguments 
of our modern beer-house philosophers and inoculated 
with the poison of scepticism, they have begun to doubt 
the possibility of a life after the death of the body, and 
therefore they make no efforts to save themselves and 
to develop that internal power by which they might 
become conscious of a higher state of existence. 

They have come to regard life as being its own object 
and to ridicule the idea of any conscious existence after 
the death of the mortal form. They look upon material 
comforts as being of supreme importance to man and 
the only means for the attainment of happiness. New 
luxuries are invented every day, and they become to- 
morrow indispensable necessities for existence ; but still 
there is no contentment. The gratification of desires 
merely begets new desires as long as the power to 
enjoy that gratification exists, and thus the chains 
which bind man to matter are growing stronger day 
by day, while the claims of the imprisoned spirit are 
laughed at and neglected. Christ, being looked upon 



202 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

as being merely an historical person, a thing of the past, 
is sent away to the garret, and that higher state of con- 
sciousness which constitutes the true Christ in Man 
is a thing equally unknown to the layman as it is to the 
priest. 

The world swarms with reformers. They are shaking 
the foundations of the Church and the State, and the 
temples are tottering ; they resemble a swarm of birds 
flying around a tree, seeking to change the nature of 
the tree by picking at the leaves ; they seek to trim the 
branches, while they have no means of changing the 
nature of the sap, and therefore their efforts are of little 
avail ; they can merely produce ruin, but they cannot 
build up. Men have become unnatural and crave for 
unnatural things ; external life, instead of being a true 
expression of the internal thought-life, is entirely out 
of harmony with the latter ; words are no more the 
expression of thoughts, and acts are not in harmony 
with the words. 

It seems that the only way to restore mankind to its 
natural condition is to assist it to rise up to a realiza- 
tion of the truth; not to establish a new religious 
system, based upon some new theory, but a religion 
based upon self-knowledge and knowledge of self. To 
do this, we need not present humanity with some new 
dogma, but we may submit to them some thoughts for 
their own consideration. 

According to the Wisdom-Religion of the ancients, 
aboriginal Man was a spiritual power, emanating from 



CONCLUSION. 



203 



the Great First Cause of all existence, descending 
"gradually into Matter, and becoming more and more 
material during that descent, which lasted for millions 
of ages, until he became differentiated in corporeal and 
gross material forms of two different sexes. His in- 
corruptible spiritual principle, the foundation of his 
existence, became, so to say, concentrated within the 
innermost centre of his being and veiled by matter of 
a corruptible kind. In consequence of this "Fall," his 
communication with the world of Light was cut off, his 
"inner eye" closed to the perception of things of the 
spirit, while his external senses developed for the per- 
ception of corporeal and external things. From this 
state of degradation no mortal man can save himself, 
nor would any man ever make the attempt to rise again 
to his former state of spirituality, not knowing that 
such a state exists or is possible to attain ; if it were 
not for that divine Light of the Logos, called the Christy 
continually acting through the veil of Matter upon the 
spark of Divinity still existing within the soul of man 
and stimulating the same into activity through the 
powers of Intuition and Conscience, attempting to 
induce Man to seek for that higher state of which mor- 
tal man does not know, but of which the Soul feels, 
the existence. If man conquers the living elements 
acting within his material nature, and which are appeal- 
ing to his love for animal life and animal pleasure ; and 
if he follows the voice of Wisdom within, the gross 
elements of his " Soul " become gradually refined ; the 



204 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

veil of Matter, which hides the spiritual world from his 
sight, becomes thinner, and at last he may arrive at a 
state in which he "dies" to the attractions of sense 
and is reborn in the spirit. This freedom from the 
attraction of Matter is that liberty for which man ought 
to strive ; it is symbolized by the Eagle rising above the 
clouds of matter and enjoying the light of the Spirit. 
The true building of the Temple of Sol-Om-On con- 
sists, therefore, in the tearing down of the miserable 
hut built up of erroneous opinions and perverted tastes, 
— a hovel which we have erected ourselves by our own 
thoughts, and wherein we dwell. It consists in the 
opening of its walls and roof, so that the Light of the 
Truth may enter and drive away the darkness of its 
interior ; it consists in the regaining of the power of 
the Spirit over Matter, — a power which is the natural 
birthright of immortal Man. 

There are three stages by which this herculean task 
is accomplished and spiritual knowledge attained. The 
first is known to all men. It consists of the power to 
intuitively know the good from the bad, the just from 
the unjust, the pure from the impure, etc. ; it is called 
"Conscience," or, more properly, spiritual Inspiration. 
The second degree of receptivity consists in the ca- 
pacity, not only to feel, but to understand intellectually, 
spiritual truths. It is a state known only to those who 
have attained it, and it is called interior Illumination. 
The third degree is only attained by few, and the great 
majority of mankind in the West do not believe that it 



CONCLUSION. 205 

exists. It consists in an entire opening of the spiritual 
senses, by which spiritual realities become objectively 
perceptible to the soul of man, and it is called divine 
Contemplation. It is the highest kind of worship and 
true adoration. 

These three modes of perception are as natural and 
as easily comprehended by those who know by experi- 
ence the higher nature of Man, as are the sensual 
perceptive powers of man's semi-animal body to those 
who have studied his perishable form ; but to those who 
know nothing about the higher nature of man and who 
do not believe in his spiritual powers, anything higher 
than the semi-animal existence of man is incomprehen- 
sible and incredible, and man's spiritual powers do not 
exist for them. 

There have, however, even in the most ancient times, 
up to the present day, existed men in whom this power 
of divine contemplation has been developed, and who 
are therefore in possession of superior knowledge, and 
if we desire to receive information in regard to spiritual 
things before we have attained the power to perceive 
them ourselves, we may look to those men for instruc- 
tion. Not that a belief in their doctrines should be 
the final end of our aspirations for knowledge ; but as a 
traveller who has gone through a wilderness may indicate 
the way to those who follow after him, so may the teach- 
ings of the Adepts serve as landmarks and guides to 
those who wander about in search of the truth. Such 
a man was Jehoshua the Adept. 



206 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

Such men are not easily to be found within the 
churches of to-day ; for ever since the representatives of 
the churches have lost the key to the understanding of 
the mysteries of religion, and begun to mistake the 
forms for the spirit, churchianism has become identical 
with narrow-mindedness and dogmatism. They cling to 
beliefs accepted from each other ; while true Knowledge 
is free of foreign opinions and lives in her own realiza- 
tion of the truth. 

The attainment of this knowledge is that glorious 
resurrection from the darkness of ignorance, by which 
the Spirit of Man, bursting the shell of matter, arises 
from the tomb in which he was imprisoned and regains 
his previous freedom. It is not a state to be expected 
in the problematical hereafter, when the physical body 
has returned to its elements ; for death of the body 
can merely relieve us of things which have become use- 
less to us : it cannot give us anything which we do not 
possess when we die. The object of man's life is to 
rise up higher in the scale of evolution, while he is 
living upon this earth ; to develop new powers during 
his contact with matter ; to acquire more strength and 
knowledge during his terrestrial existence, and on ac- 
count of the latter; so that he may live in a higher 
state of consciousness and enjoy the possession of 
knowledge of spiritual truths, which he has acquired 
during his earthly career, unimpeded by the sensations 
arising from the sphere of illusions, when he re-enters 
the subjective state, the state of rest. 



CONCLUSION. 20 J 

All the boasted knowledge of the science learned 
in schools contains no real knowledge whatever. It 
knows nothing of absolute truth. It is merely relative 
knowledge, and refers to the relations which external 
objects bear to each other ; and all this knowledge, 
however useful it may be as long as we live in this 
world of external illusions and " objective hallucina- 
tions," will be entirely useless to us when we enter 
that state in which those illusions do not exist. The 
only true science, which is really useful to us in time 
and eternity, in our present condition, not less than in 
the hereafter, is the practical knowledge of the Regen- 
eration of Man. 

This knowledge is acquired neither by the study of 
theology and philosophy, nor by moralizing. It does 
not depend on any theoretical information in regard to 
terrestrial or celestial things, nor can spiritual regenera- 
tion be attained by leading a virtuous life for fear of 
the consequences that are likely to follow if we indulge 
in evil ; it can only be acquired by a realization of the 
truth within our own selves. There is nothing to pre- 
vent any man from arriving at such a realization, except 
the lower tendencies of his mortal nature. The process 
of spiritual regeneration therefore involves a continual 
battle with this lower self ; an unceasing fight between 
spiritual aspirations and earthly desires, in which the 
Spirit must gain the victory over Matter. 

Spirit is Substance, Reality, Unity. It is therefore 
indestructible, indivisible, impenetrable, incorruptible, 



208 THE LIFE OF JEHOSHUA. 

eternal. Matter is an Aggregate, Multiplicity, Illusion ; 
it is therefore unsubstantial, divisible, corruptible, and 
subject to continuaf change. If man gains complete 
mastery over the " Matter" composing his own consti- 
tution, then will the realm of spiritual knowledge open 
before him, and he will become conscious of the pres- 
ence of Christ. Then will the curtain that hides the 
sanctuary of the spiritual Temple of Divine Wisdom be 
rent asunder, the Great Mystery will be revealed, and 
Man will know his own saviour. Then will he arise 
from the tomb of Ignorance and walk again in the 
bright daylight of immortal Truth, that existed in the 
beginning and will exist at the end. 

As long as man does not know his own divine self, 
he will continue to seek in externals that which can 
only be found interiorly ; as long as he has not found 
his ideal in his own soul, he will cling to external ideals ; 
but when he awakens to the realization of the divine 
power within himself, he will cease to look for salvation 
in external persons and things, and instead of seeking 
for a Christ in history he will find the true Jesus within 
himself. 



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